(I think I will change the name to Bake Wrangler to be less confusing with other addons)
Primary Features
Easy to use Nodes based interface
Never modifies anything in your blend file
Entirely background process, keep working in your current file. Changes you make won’t break anything
Extra PBR bake targets (only for Principled Shader) and image channel manipulation
This is a new add-on I’ve been developing. My work flow involves a lot of rendering materials and data to textures and while the inbuilt baking system is fine for making a few maps, it’s not great and doesn’t generate some of the ones you need when exporting for PBR (without messing around with your materials).
So I made this to add some of the features I wanted and thought it would be neat to have a nice nodes based interface. There are some other baking add-ons but they didn’t look very easy to use. It’s not finished yet, this is just the first beta to see if people like it and fix any early bugs. It is completely functional, there are just more features I want to add.
The main thing missing is a batch processing node. I also thought of adding an image output node that uses image objects in your scene instead of saving directly to file, an anti-aliasing node and maybe a quick preview that would automatically add a material with the baked textures to an object.
Extra things you can already do in this version:
Bake: Albedo, Metalness, Alpha, Emission (for materials that use Principled Shader)
Map baked data to different channels of your image (Alpha, R/G/B)
Use different resolutions for bake and final image (can also be used for simple anti-aliasing)
I am thinking of maybe selling it for a few dollars. Depends if it’s something people would like to use, then I can add extra features that are wanted by users. If not I will just finish adding the things I want and leave it there.
Please try it out if you do any regular baking. Let me know if the completed version is something you would consider paying a bit for so that it can have extra features (completed version will at the very least include batch processing of multiple bake nodes). Also tell me what extra features you would want in a paid version! And report any bugs
If you open the console, you will see more messages about the bake. Also it will tell you where it is saving a more detailed log file of everything that happened (it goes in your ‘tmp’ location). I think there is an error creating the file which I will look into.
That seems strange @hidesai, lots of other add-ons use relative imports and I assume they work on linux. What linux is this happening on? Are you using a python bundled with blender or external (can you even use an external version)?
Wait, why is path ‘PrincipledBakery\_init_.py’? Shouldn’t it be a ‘/’? It looks like it didn’t install properly, maybe it’s a problem with the windows generated zip?
Okay I checked and the zip is at fault. On linux it expands as file names instead of directorties. That is what I get for using PowerShell to automate the release zip.
Good thing we now have two bake tools with almost equal names.
Don’t worry! I’m not complaining. I find it hilarious!
Now we have a Baker and a Bakery, we can bake donuts - in principle.
I’m very interested to see how it performs with a large project.
I’m not sure how you can support it yet… There are a lot of other baking add-ons, so I don’t know if this does anything people would want to support financially. Maybe I could put a donate link (but in my experience people never donate) or try putting it on gumroad/etc…
Yes! You can bake your pass into any of the image channels. That was one of the things I found really annoying, having to use the compositor or external editor to put alpha, etc.
I was also thinking of adding an invert node so you can bake the inverse of things…
