MeshMind
Bake Manager — Batch Texture Baking for Blender
Bake PBR textures for an entire batch of low-poly assets — with pre-bake diagnostics that catch black patches and UV overlaps before you waste a single render.
You already know the problem with baking textures in Blender
Blender's built-in bake tools work fine for one object. They fall apart at forty. A cage that's slightly off produces a black patch you don't notice until it's already in-engine. A UV overlap silently corrupts a texture you baked twenty minutes ago. And there's no queue — every job is a manual, one-at-a-time babysit.
Bake Manager is a texture baking addon for Blender that adds the production layer that's missing: a real batch job queue, diagnostics that catch problems before you spend the bake time, and LOD-aware baking for asset pipelines that need more than one polycount.
Built for game and hard-surface pipelines
If you're baking normal, AO, and PBR maps for game-ready assets — solo, freelance, or inside a studio — and you're tired of re-doing bakes because a cage missed geometry or a UV island overlapped, this is built for exactly that workflow. It's equally at home baking a single hero prop or running an overnight queue across an entire prop set for Unity, Unreal, or Godot.
Pre-bake diagnostics
Run diagnostics on a job before you bake it, and Bake Manager tells you exactly what will fail and why — cage/ray coverage that will miss the high-poly, and UV islands that overlap. Every issue links straight to a one-click Select Faces so you find the bad geometry in seconds, not after a wasted bake.
Everything you need for a real pipeline
Add, remove, duplicate and reorder jobs. Run the whole queue unattended — Bake Manager tracks progress per job and reports status as it goes.
Diffuse, Metallic, Roughness, Emission, Alpha, Colour ID and Curvature (emission-wire technique, works with complex node graphs), plus full native Normal and AO with selected-to-active + cage support.
Auto-generate decimated LODs and bake the same map set against each — one job setup covers your entire LOD chain.
{object}, {maptype}, {udim}, {resolution} tokens, plus ready-made Unity / Unreal / Godot naming presets.
Save the entire queue as a portable JSON file that resolves objects by name. Commit it next to your .blend or hand it to another artist.
No external dependencies. Works identically on Windows, macOS and Linux.
Quick start
Select a low-poly mesh object, open the N-panel → Bake Manager tab, and click + to add a job.
Optionally set a high-poly Source object for Normal / AO, and enable the maps you need under Map Types.
Click Run Diagnostics and fix anything flagged before spending bake time.
Click Bake This Job Only or Bake Entire Queue. Textures write to //textures/ by default.
Where it stands today (v1.1)
These are intentional scope decisions for this version, not unfinished stubs:
- Each job bakes one target (plus its LODs) to its own texture set — multi-object → single atlas isn't supported.
- UDIM is exposed as a toggle; the engine currently bakes the primary tile. Full multi-tile UDIM is planned.
- Deep Mix Shader trees may need a Principled node connected more directly — one Mix/Add level is walked automatically.
- Queue baking is sequential (Blender's bake operator is main-thread only) — this is unattended, not multi-threaded background rendering.
- Curvature uses a Bevel-node approximation with a proper 0–1 remap — serviceable, but not colour-calibrated for every pipeline.
Frequently asked questions
Does Bake Manager support batch baking multiple objects at once?
Yes — add each object as its own job in the queue, then run Bake Entire Queue to process all of them unattended. Each job bakes to its own texture set; combining multiple objects into a single shared atlas isn't supported yet.
Can it catch baking errors before I run the bake?
Yes — that's the core of the addon. Run Diagnostics on a job and it checks cage/ray coverage and UV overlaps up front, with a one-click "Select Faces" to jump straight to the problem geometry.
Does it bake LODs automatically?
Yes — enable LOD-Aware Baking on a job, set the number of levels and the decimation ratio step, and Bake Manager generates the LOD chain and bakes the same map set against each level.
Is it compatible with Unity, Unreal, or Godot naming conventions?
Yes — naming templates support {object}, {maptype}, {udim}, and {resolution} tokens, with ready-made Unity, Unreal, and Godot presets built in.
What Blender version does Bake Manager require?
Blender 4.2 or newer. It's pure Python with no external dependencies, so it runs identically on Windows, macOS, and Linux.
Stop guessing whether a bake will work. Know before you run it.
Bake Manager — GPL-3.0-or-later — Requires Blender 4.2+
