Bake Pass Reference

A Bake Pass node (see Bake Pass) offers its passes in three groups. This page documents every pass in each group. Options specific to individual passes are covered in Bake Pass; this page focuses on what each pass actually captures.

Tip

Every pass also has a matching tooltip in Blender itself when you hover over the pass drop-down — this page mirrors those descriptions with a bit more context.

PBR passes

These read values directly from a Principled BSDF-based material and require the object’s material(s) to use one (Bake Wrangler warns during validation if a material doesn’t appear to be a compatible combination of Principled and Mix/Add shader nodes). They capture the input value itself, without lighting or other shader influence.

Common

Pass	Captures
Albedo	Surface color without any lighting
Metallic	Surface “metalness” value
Roughness	Surface roughness value
Smoothness	Inverted roughness value
IOR	Index of Refraction
Alpha	Surface transparency value
AOV Node	The color or value output of a named AOV node in the material

Normals

Pass	Captures
Combined	Combined surface normals
Texture	Normals influenced only by texture values, with no geometry influence
Coat	Normals influenced only by the coat layer
Geometry	Normals ignoring any texture influence
Billboard	Normals using the target billboard’s rotation as tangent space

Emission

Pass	Captures
Color	Self-emission color
Strength	Self-emission strength

Subsurface

Pass	Captures
Weight	Blend amount between diffuse and subsurface scattering
Radius	Per-channel distance light scatters below the surface (a higher R value means red light travels deeper)
Scale	Multiplier applied to the subsurface radius
IOR	Subsurface scattering IOR
Anisotropy	Amount of anisotropy in the subsurface scattering

Specular

Pass	Captures
IOR	IOR used for specular intensity
Tint	Tint of direct-facing reflections (note: real dielectrics have colorless reflections — this exists for faking certain effects)
Anisotropic	Amount of anisotropy for specular reflections
Aniso Rotation	Rotation direction of the specular anisotropy
Tangent	Tangent vector used for specular highlights

Transmission

Pass	Captures
Weight	Surface opacity/transmission weight

Coat

Pass	Captures
Weight	Intensity of the coat layer (both reflection and tint)
Roughness	Coat roughness
IOR	Coat IOR
Tint	Coat tint color

Sheen

Pass	Captures
Weight	Amount of soft, velvet-like edge reflection typical of cloth
Roughness	Roughness of sheen reflections
Tint	Color mixed with white for sheen reflections

Blender passes

Standard Blender bake pass types. Passes here that share a name with a PBR or Wrangler pass behave differently — these are the full render-engine passes, most of which respond to lighting and scene setup, not raw material inputs.

Pass	Description
Combined	Combines multiple lighting/shading passes into one bake. Has Direct/Indirect toggles plus Diffuse/Glossy/Transmission/Emit component toggles (see Bake Pass). Needs scene lighting or a World to produce anything.
Ambient Occlusion	Surface self-occlusion
Shadow	Shadow map
Position	World-space position map
Normal	Surface normals (see Bake Pass for the shared normal-map options)
UV	UV layout
Roughness	Surface roughness (render-engine value, as opposed to the PBR pass’s raw input)
Smoothness	Inverted roughness
Emit	Self-emission color
Environment	Colors arriving from the environment/world
Diffuse	Colors generated by a diffuse shader, with Direct/Indirect/Color toggles
Glossy	Colors generated by a glossy shader, with Direct/Indirect/Color toggles
Transmission	Colors of light passing through a material, with Direct/Indirect/Color toggles
Multiresolution	Bakes Normals or Displacement data from a Multiresolution modifier, sampling between chosen subdivision levels

Note

Combined, Diffuse, Glossy, and Transmission require actual lighting in the scene (from Scene-connected lights, or a World enabled under Pass Settings’ advanced options) to produce any output at all.

Wrangler passes

Bake Wrangler’s own additional passes, not tied to the Principled shader model.

Pass	Description
Bevel Mask	Beveled/rounded areas are baked in white, everything else black
Bevel Normals (Emit)	A normal map containing only bevel influence. Can bake from one object to another, but inverted faces will come out backwards
Bevel Normals (Norm)	The same, but computed in a way that correctly handles inverted faces — at the cost of not supporting baking between two different objects
Cavity/Edges	A grayscale map of surface cavities, or (with Edge Mode on) of edges instead
Curvature	A grayscale map of surface curvature, with configurable flat/convex/concave value mapping
Height (OSL)	A height map derived from the distance between two surfaces. OSL-based, so CPU-only
Island ID	Each UV island of faces is baked in a distinct random color
Material ID	Each material is baked as a distinct, semi-random solid color derived from its name (or its assigned viewport color, if that option is enabled)
Object Color	Each object is baked using its own assigned viewport display color
Position	Areas of the object are baked with colors representing their position in world space
Thickness	Mesh thickness, mapped from white (thin) to black (thick)
Vertex Color	Bakes a chosen vertex color layer as the surface color
Bent Normals (OSL)	Normals bent based on ambient occlusion, giving them a directional bias
UV Mask	A plain black-and-white mask of which pixels are covered by any UV island
UV Islands	Each UV island is baked using a distinct random color
Sculpt Face Sets	Each Face Set defined by Blender’s sculpt tools is baked as a distinct random color
Vector Displacement	Calculates the vector displacement between two objects’ surfaces, for use as a vector displacement map