baking procedural shading in blender?

[Alma Palmira]

I've been doing my best to learn how to use procedural textures in Blender (nodes). Once again I know just enough to get me into trouble. In this screen shot you can see the build I am working on, as well as the node tree that includes my AO as well as my base texture. It seems to be working on the screen, but when I try to bake the result so I can upload the AO part is not rendering. I am using cycles and have the baking set as combined but still no go. I'm obviously missing something in my gap-filled vertical knowledge silos. Maybe I don't need to bake at all? Any help or suggestions would be appreciated.

[Quarrel Kukulcan]

There are some oddities. You run a color directly to the material output surface shader input instead of using the principled shader output. Also, I have no idea how you're getting any results doing a combined bake with neither lighting option checked. I get either black output or an error when I try that. In any case, I can't get this problem to happen myself.

Since you're using an AO node as part of creating the diffuse color, you should be able to do a diffuse (not combined) bake and select only Color. (But fix your final output link first.)

Edited July 30, 2021 by Quarrel Kukulcan

[Extrude Ragu]

Think of nodes like a system of conveyor belts all leading to your Material Output Node.

The node in your picture that does all the shader stuff is the BSDF Shader. But that data then goes unused. It's not plugged into the output.

[Alma Palmira]

Thank you both. I cleaned (simplified) my node tree using the bdsm shader (that was a joke) as the anchor before going to material output. I also switched to diffuse which allowed me to play around with color, indirect and direct, lighting outputs (I added a light). Learning nodes is like learning a whole new program inside another program.  There is a certain hierarchical logic to it that eludes me, but is slowly becoming clearer. YouTube help in this area is sometimes more dangerous than helpful. Thanks again. This community rocks!