Auto Sort, Join & Explode, and Auto Cage

These features automate the tedious parts of setting up many similar bakes — matching high-poly sources to low-poly targets by name, combining objects before baking, and generating cage geometry — instead of wiring every object by hand.

Auto Sort

Available both as a standalone Auto Sort Meshes node (see Object & Utility Input Nodes) and as an Auto Sort option on the Input Mesh node itself (under Join + Explode & Auto Sort), Auto Sort pairs Target, Source, and Scene objects together by extracting a shared “identifier” from their names (or the collections they belong to), rather than requiring one-to-one wiring.

Identifier syntax

Each of the three roles (Target, Source, Scene) has its own identifier field using the same mini-syntax:

<n> — a capturing wildcard: whatever matches this part of the name becomes the value compared across roles.
<*> — a non-capturing wildcard: matches anything, but isn’t used for comparison.
Everything else in the field is matched literally.

For example, if your targets are named objectX.low and your sources are named high.objectX, set the Target identifier to <n>.low and the Source identifier to high.<n> — both extract objectX as the shared name, and Bake Wrangler pairs them automatically.

A target named objectX.low matched against pattern <n>.low, and a source named high.objectX matched against pattern high.<n>, both extracting objectX and forming a matched pair

An empty identifier field disables sorting for that role and passes every connected object straight through instead of trying to match it.

Search mode (Auto Sort Meshes node)

The standalone Auto Sort Meshes node exposes an equivalent but slightly different set of controls per role: a search mode (Pass Through, Starts, Ends, Contains → , ← Contains) plus the identifier string itself, since it strips a literal identifier out of the name rather than matching against a wildcard pattern. Both approaches solve the same problem; use whichever node fits your recipe layout better.

Collections

Each role also has a Match Collections toggle. When enabled, Bake Wrangler first tries to match whole collections against the identifier before falling back to matching the individual objects inside them — useful when your high/low pairs are organized into per-object collections rather than named consistently as loose objects.

Checking your matches

On the Input Mesh node, expand its extra options (the small arrow) to reveal Update Sorting, a live read-out of exactly which objects got grouped together — tick Continually Update Sorting to keep it live as you edit identifiers (this can be slow with a lot of objects).
On the standalone Auto Sort Meshes node, the equivalent is Show Groupings in its extra options.

Join & Explode

Also found under Join + Explode & Auto Sort on mesh-input nodes:

Join Targets / Join Sources — combines every connected target (or source) object into a single mesh before baking, without altering your actual scene objects.
Explode — only available once Join Targets is on. Temporarily offsets each object by a distance before joining, so overlapping geometry from separate objects doesn’t interfere with the bake (a common problem when joining several unwrapped objects that happen to share the same space). Choose an offset distance, an axis (X, Y, Z, or Grid for a 2D grid layout), and — for a single-axis explode — whether to move purely along that axis or preserve the object’s other transform offsets too.

Preview mode

Click Preview to enter a live, non-destructive 3D viewport preview of the exploded layout: targets are drawn as solid shapes, sources as wireframes, without moving any real objects. While previewing:

O toggles showing/hiding the real (un-exploded) objects
L toggles offset lines between each object’s original and exploded position
N toggles name labels
Esc or right-click exits the preview

This is especially useful in combination with Auto Sort, since it lets you visually confirm which sources are following which targets before committing to a bake.

Auto Cage

A cage is extra geometry, usually a slightly expanded copy of the target, used to control where bake rays are cast from for a source-to-target bake — useful when the target’s own surface would cause ray misses or self-intersections. Rather than modeling cages by hand, enable Auto Cage in a Mesh Settings node to have Bake Wrangler generate one automatically for any target that doesn’t already have a manually assigned cage. Two related fields control the result:

Cage Expansion — how far the generated cage is pushed outward along the target’s normals.
Cage Smoothing Angle — the angle range within which the generated cage’s normals are auto-smoothed, to avoid faceting artifacts in the ray-cast pattern.

Generated cages aren’t created until you ask for them. Use the Auto Cages panel in the Bake Node Editor’s side panel (see Interface) to:

Generate Cages — creates cages (as a Displace modifier over a copy of the mesh) for every eligible target in the recipe, collecting them into a BW Cages collection in your scene.
Update Cages — refreshes existing generated cages if their expansion/smoothing settings have changed. If you’ve manually removed the underlying bw_cage modifier from a generated cage, this regenerates it from scratch instead of trying to patch it.
Remove Cages — deletes generated cages and unlinks the BW Cages collection.

Shift-click any of the three buttons to skip objects currently hidden in the viewport.

Tip

A manually assigned cage (set directly on an object entry via the Use Cage toggle) is always preferred over an auto-generated one for that object, so you can mix hand-modeled cages and automatic ones freely within the same recipe.