Interface

The Bake Node Editor

Bake Wrangler adds a dedicated editor type, Bake Node Editor, selectable from the editor-type drop-down like any other editor. A recipe is a node tree stored in your .blend file, so you can have several recipes and switch between them like you would switch between shader node groups.

The editor’s side panel (press N to toggle it, or drag out from the right edge) has a Bake Wrangler tab with the following panels:

Recipe Info

Shows the recipe’s internal format version, the currently installed add-on’s version, and the node count. If a recipe was created by an older version of the add-on, its version number will be lower than the add-on’s, and an Update Recipe button appears to upgrade it in place (see Troubleshooting). This panel also has a Show Log button that opens the last bake log (if any) for the current recipe in a new window.

Auto Cages

Lets you generate, refresh, or remove the mesh objects used as automatic ray-cast cages (see Auto Cage in Settings Nodes) for every object in the recipe that has that option enabled. Generated cages are collected into a BW Cages collection in your scene so they’re easy to find and hide from renders. Shift-click any of the three buttons to skip objects that are currently hidden in the viewport.

Recipe Library

A small database of saved recipes you can pull into any file — see Recipes & Presets.

How baking actually runs

When you click a bake button, Bake Wrangler doesn’t bake inside your current Blender session. Instead it:

  1. Validates the part of the tree you’re baking (see Troubleshooting for what gets checked and what the messages mean).

  2. Saves a temporary copy of your .blend file.

  3. Launches a separate, background instance of Blender (no window) pointed at that temp copy, which performs the actual bake.

  4. Streams progress, warnings, and errors from that background process back into your current session.

This means your original Blender session stays fully interactive while a bake runs — you can keep working, and even start another bake in a different recipe. It also means you should save your file before baking so the background process is working from up-to-date data.

While a bake is running:

  • Any node that started the bake shows a Cancel Bake button in place of its bake button. Clicking it asks for confirmation before stopping the background process.

  • If Messages in Editor is enabled in preferences, a live log overlay is drawn over the node editor while baking. Scroll with the mouse wheel or arrow keys to look back through it (this pauses auto-scroll); click or right-click to dismiss it.

  • The status bar icon (see below) turns blue.

When it finishes, results are reported via Blender’s normal status message, the log is written to a text block named BakeWrangler in your file (if Messages in Editor is on), and any baked images that were selected to auto-open are loaded into your Image Editor.

The status bar icon

If Show BW Icon in Status Bar is enabled in preferences, a small colored icon appears in Blender’s status bar at the bottom of the window:

  • Green — idle, last bake (if any) succeeded.

  • Blue — a bake is currently running.

  • Red — the last bake finished with errors, or failed.

Click the icon to open the current BakeWrangler log text block in a new window. Ctrl-click to open the log from the most recent background bake process specifically (useful if you’ve since cleared or replaced the text block). Ctrl+Alt-click opens the temporary .blend file copy that the last background bake ran from, in its own Blender window — handy for debugging a bake that failed in a way that’s hard to reproduce.

Vertex color results

Passes baked to the Output Vertex Colors node (or a Batch Bake node that includes one) are written by the background process and staged as temporary files rather than applied immediately, since the background process is working on a separate copy of your file. After a bake completes, the same node shows Apply and Discard buttons: click Apply to write the baked vertex color data into your current file’s objects, or Discard to throw the staged data away. Nothing is written to your objects until you click Apply.