Bake Wrangler

Bake Wrangler is a Blender add-on that replaces Blender’s built-in baking workflow with a node-based interface. Instead of selecting objects and clicking “Bake” over and over, you build a recipe: a network of nodes describing which objects to bake, what kind of data to bake from them, and where the results should be saved. Once a recipe is built you can re-run the whole thing — or any part of it — with a single click, and Bake Wrangler will re-bake everything downstream of anything you change.

On top of Blender’s standard bake passes, Bake Wrangler adds a large library of extra passes (curvature, cavity, thickness, bevel masks, material/UV/island ID maps, vector displacement, and more), tools for batching many objects through the same setup, UDIM and vertex-color output, and a background-process bake engine so baking doesn’t lock up your Blender session.

Note

This documentation covers Bake Wrangler 2.0.4, which targets Blender 5.0.1 and later. If you’re coming from the 1.x series, node graphs from old files will be offered an automatic upgrade the first time you open them — see Troubleshooting for details.

Where to start

• New to Bake Wrangler? Start with Installation and then Quick Start.

• Looking for what a specific node does? See Nodes.

• Looking for a specific bake pass (Curvature, Cavity, Material ID, etc.)? See Bake Pass Reference.

• Something not baking the way you expect? See Troubleshooting.

Contents

• Installation
  • Install from a zip file
  • Updating
  • What gets installed
  • Permissions
• Quick Start
  • 1. Open the Bake Node Editor
  • 2. The three kinds of nodes
  • 3. Target, Source, and Scene
  • 4. Pick what to bake
  • 5. Set the output path
  • 6. Bake
  • Where to next
• Interface
  • The Bake Node Editor
  • How baking actually runs
  • The status bar icon
  • Vertex color results
• Preferences
  • Interface
  • Options
  • Performance
  • Developer
• Nodes
  • Settings Nodes
  • Object & Utility Input Nodes
  • Mesh Input Nodes
  • Bake Pass
  • Post-Processing Nodes
  • Output Nodes
  • Add menu categories
  • Sockets at a glance
• Bake Pass Reference
  • PBR passes
  • Blender passes
  • Wrangler passes
• File Naming, Tokens & Frame Ranges
  • Basic naming
  • Splitting output per object
  • Token substitution
  • Frame ranges
  • UDIM output
• Auto Sort, Join & Explode, and Auto Cage
  • Auto Sort
  • Join & Explode
  • Auto Cage
• Recipes & Presets
  • Recipe Library
  • Settings Presets
• Troubleshooting
  • Before baking: validation
  • Recipes from an older add-on version
  • The background bake process
  • Vertex color output not appearing on my mesh
  • Getting help

Getting involved

Bake Wrangler is developed in the open. Suggestions, bug reports, and general discussion happen on the Blender Artists forum thread.