Quick Start

This page walks through baking your first texture with Bake Wrangler.

1. Open the Bake Node Editor

Once the add-on is installed and enabled, switch any editor area to Bake Node Editor using the editor-type drop-down in its top-left corner. Click New to create a recipe (this is just a Blender node tree, like a shader node tree or geometry node tree — it’s saved with your .blend file).

A new recipe starts with a minimal chain of nodes already connected: an Objects input, an Input Mesh node, a Bake Pass node, and an Output Image Path node. This page walks through what each of those does.

Objects feeding an Input Mesh node, into a Bake Pass node, into an Output Image Path node, with a pinned Recipe Settings node supplying settings to all three

2. The three kinds of nodes

Every recipe is built from three broad kinds of node, connected left to right:

  • Inputs — describe what to bake (which objects, which materials).

  • Passes — describe what kind of data to bake (color, normals, curvature, etc.) from those inputs.

  • Outputs — describe where the result should end up (an image file, vertex colors, or a batch of both).

Most of these node types also have a matching Settings node (Mesh Settings, Pass Settings, Output Settings) which plugs into a Settings socket on the node next to it. You don’t have to attach one to every node individually — instead, drop a single Recipe Settings node anywhere in the tree and click its Pin button. A pinned Settings node supplies settings to any node in the tree whose Settings socket is left unconnected, so a simple recipe usually only needs the one pinned settings node. See Settings Nodes for the full breakdown of what each settings group controls.

3. Target, Source, and Scene

The mesh-input nodes (Input Mesh, Input UV Transfer, Input Billboard) share a common idea of three object roles:

  • Target — the object you are baking to. It must be a mesh with a UV map. You can also connect a list of objects (via an Objects node) here, which bakes each of them with the same settings. This socket must be filled in for the node to be valid.

  • Source — the object you are baking from (a “high poly to low poly” style bake). This is optional; if it’s left empty, data is taken from the target object itself. Most renderable object types can be a source, and a list of objects can be connected too. If multiple sources are connected, all of them contribute to every target.

  • Scene — used to include lights and other scene objects that should cast light or shadows onto the bake but aren’t otherwise part of the target/source relationship. This matters because passes like Combined, Diffuse, and Glossy produce no output at all without some lighting contribution — either from objects connected here, or from the World, which can be enabled separately under a Pass Settings node’s advanced options.

4. Pick what to bake

Select a Bake Pass node and choose a Group (PBR, Blender, or Wrangler) and then a Pass within that group. Hovering over the pass drop-down shows a tooltip explaining what it does and any material requirements. The full list of passes is documented in Bake Pass Reference.

5. Set the output path

The Output Image Path node needs a folder and a file-name prefix. Type these directly into its Split Output socket, or connect a File Names node upstream to generate per-object file names automatically and to control frame ranges — see File Naming, Tokens & Frame Ranges.

6. Bake

Every node that can trigger a bake (a Bake Pass, an Output node, or a Batch Bake node) has a bake button — click it to bake just that part of the tree, or everything upstream and downstream of it that’s connected. Bake Wrangler runs the actual bake in a separate, background instance of Blender, so your current session stays responsive; progress and any warnings or errors are streamed back and shown as an overlay in the node editor (and recorded to a BakeWrangler text block you can review afterwards). See Interface for details on that process, and Troubleshooting for common validation errors.

Where to next