1.9.2 is the most recent one on Blender Market.
edit: sorry, my bad! I went immediately to the Download section and didn’t get that there was an upgrade necessary. It’s only visible on the actual store page.
edit2: up and running again. 
Ah, yes. The store has separate section for v1 and v2.
Gamma seems to be way off when baking Blender Diffuse (Color only) / PBR Albedo (sRGB space), both when baking textures or just a color:
BW:
others:
Other passes seem to be fine. Did I maybe miss something?
Yes I’m currently investigating this issue. I don’t know what is causing yet, but it’s something in blender 5.x no longer applies the color space transform like it used to…
Basically it’s not applying the sRGB space on the albedo, if you set the color mode to Linear or Non-Color on the image it will look correct. You could then save it as sRGB as a work-around until I fix it.
(I only personally started using 5.x recently and I’m still finding I have to swap back to 4.5 for a bunch of stuff)
I tried non-color but it gave me the same result. Using a Gamma node set to 0.454545 (1 / 2.2) seems to work though.
Are you using a file with bake recipe you created in an earlier version of blender? Just trying to chase down the cause…
I’ve uploaded a new version that I think fixes the issue (also has a couple of other minor fixes).
Let me know if you have any problems with it.
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Hello!
I recently started using Bake Wrangler and it’s fantastic. Saves so many tedious clicks when trying to bake a whole lot of textures. I was also having the issue with sRGB not applying properly, and that seems fixed in the latest version. However, I think it introduced a new issue, or it might have been preexisting.
Either way, channel packing onto the alpha seems bit broken. It seems to be treating it as straight or premultiplied and losing color data in the completely transparent parts.
Here is what I mean (apologies for the dumb screenshot, the site won’t let me embed more than one image):
From left to right, top to bottom, these images are:
the texture with the alpha applied, both correct and incorrect look like this
the RGB of the incorrect one
the expected RGB image.
The alpha channel does look correct, but it is messing up the color channels.
The game I’m baking images for (Mass Effect) expects the diffuse on the rgb channels and the specular map on the alpha. I would love to be able to do that channel packing as part of the bake, but as shown above, it’s not working how I expect. I’m working around it by doing to packing elsewhere in my workflow.
I noticed a few other small issues that I have also worked around. If you open a blend file and it has the Bake Recipe panel open, the extension sometimes fails to initialize with the error “AttributeError: ‘_RestrictContext’ object has no attribute ‘scene’”. I can work around this by making sure a different panel is up when I launch, or opening the default new file and then opening my blend file. From my very brief research, this indicates a race condition and you need to update the extension to make sure things are fully initialized before you try to access things that depend on this initialization being complete.
Finally, I have been experiencing the background process crashing on a malloc null return, which causes the batch bake to fail. This mostly happens when I try to bake a lot of things in a single batch. This is probably not something you can completely solve, because it seems to have to do with memory/page file constraints on my system, but if there is anything you can do to make sure memory gets released so it doesn’t climb throughout the batch bake, or make it more resilient to this so that it could pick back up where it left off automatically, I would greatly appreciate it. I’ve worked around this by breaking it into smaller batches, but this partially defeats the point of batch baking.
Overall, though this is a fantastic addon, well worth the money. Even with these issues it has drastically sped up my workflow. This is hobby work that is by no means urgent, but I thought you should be aware of the issues. I can provide a minimal repro blend file or some image files if you can’t reproduce these behaviors, and possibly help with the code. I’m a better programmer than I am a 3d modeler, which is why the node based baking setup is very appealing to me haha.
Anyway, keep up the great work!
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The crashing due to out of memory has been greatly improved by some combination of moving from Blender 5.0 to 5.1, simplifying my blend file (meshes sharing data instead of having duplicated data, when applicable), and letting Windows eat up a huge portion of my SSD with page file. So don’t worry about that one too much.
If you are baking something that isn’t alpha to the alpha channel, then it should look ‘wrong’ when you view the image. It should only look correct when viewing just RGB or A isolated. But your isolated RGB looks wrong?
Are you sure the viewer isn’t doing something weird? Have you tested if it works in the game engine?
I’m pretty sure I fixed the restricted context issue in 2.0.3…
The batch process actually already has a whole bunch of extra memory management steps to keep usage down. I don’t think there is much more I can do. I could save intermediate steps to disk, but at that point you may as well just allocate more swap space.
There is actually a retry mechanism for batch mode, it’s just turned off by default. You can enable it in the settings.
I upgraded from version 1.6 to version 2.0.3.
I need to bake a texture onto a new UV map in Targa format and add an alpha channel with a gray color. But the baking process results in no alpha channel.
This error didn’t occur in version 1.6.
Yes, the fix for color space not being applied may be stopping the alpha channel being written…
Previously I have always used the save_render() command, but in blender 5.x this now seems to ignore per image color space settings and instead apply the scene working color space. So why not just set the scene working space to the desired space? Well the scene working spaces are Linear Rec.709, Linear Rec.2020 and ACEScg. Blender working spaces are all Linear.
So I switched to using just the save() command, which does use the per image color space settings. But doesn’t let you control the output via the scenes render settings.
I’m not sure why that would fail to write out alpha, but there was a reason I didn’t use that function in the past.
Here’s what Infaviv also reports:
Please help, I don’t quite understand.
Do I need to change the scene’s color space to get the alpha channel?
Can you use 2.0.2? It will output in Linear but you can add a gamma node set to 1/2.2 to get basically sRGB.
So right now color space function is broken in blender 5.x.
I will be removing v2.0.3 as it doesn’t really fix the problem. The solution right now is to use v2.0.2 and understand that it will ALWAYS output in Linear Rec.709 no matter what you set.
To use other color space you must add a gamma node or do other post processing.
I will work on a solution, but right now there is no simple fix unfortunately.
I’ve reported it as a bug, which I think it is, but it could also be a strange design decision.
Any way, we all know how long it can be before bugs are fixed in non critical areas. So I only really see two options right now:
- Adding a compositor pass that opens the image after it’s saved and applies a color space conversion. There seems to be a node for that now, assuming it works how I think.
- Adding a dependancy on an external python library like Pillow to perform various image functions. Something I’ve avoided doing because I don’t want to the addon to require libraries not included in Blender.
Okay I’ve found the strangest thing:
This set of nodes using this color space transform (regardless of what color space you originally set) seems to correct the color space…
In this screen shot I have an AgX Log image and using the settings shown restores the color space to AgX Log… May purely be by chance because its one color tho.
Actually it seems like Blender comes with both OpenImageIO and PyOpenColorIO bundled these days.
So the way forward I think is to use the libraries directly instead of trying to use blenders image functions.
I also wonder about the use case for most of these color spaces. They are really for film and I’m not sure why anyone would be writing textures in them?
For texture baking the only real spaces are sRGB and Linear/Non-Color (They are the same thing from a pixel value pov).
I wonder if I should just make everything way more simple with just those options…
Any way, I’ve written a separate function to apply the color space. Which seems to be working.
I might also move to using OIIO for saving, but this seems to be fine for now.
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