BakeStation — production batch PBR baker

Bake an entire asset library in one click. BakeStation pairs high-poly sources with low-poly targets, generates cages automatically, channel-packs the result the way your engine actually wants it, and supports UDIM out of the box.

What it solves

Baking in vanilla Blender is one asset at a time, with manual cage modelling and per-engine packing done by hand in Photoshop. For 50 props that's a day. BakeStation does it in one click while you make coffee.

Headline features

• Batch queue. Add multiple high/low pairs. The whole list bakes sequentially, errors on one asset don't kill the rest.
• Auto cage. Generated from the low poly along its vertex normals. Configurable offset. No more "why is there a black halo around my mesh".
• Engine presets. Unity URP/HDRP, Unreal, Godot 4, glTF, Generic. Each preset routes outputs through the right channel packing (ORM, Mask, metallicRoughness) and flips normal green for DirectX engines.
• UDIM tiles. Detects 1001/1002/… UV layouts and bakes per tile.
• Seamless procedural. Bake a procedural shader graph to a tileable 2D texture by sampling onto a flat plane.
• All PBR passes. Base Color, Normal (tangent-space), Roughness, Metallic, AO, Emission, Displacement, Curvature, Material ID, Random ID.
• Auto-pair by name. Scan the scene for _high / _low pairs and populate the queue in one click.
• Quick preview bake. 256px sanity check in ~10 seconds before committing to a 4K production batch.
• Naming tokens. T_{name}{suffix} → T_chest_BC — match any studio pipeline.
• Save / Load queue JSON. Reuse "fence pack baker config" across .blend files.
• Auto preview sphere. Optionally render a free PBR-sphere thumbnail with your baked maps after every item — instant portfolio shot.
• Metadata sidecar. Each batch writes a _bakestation.json describing what was baked, in which format, for which engine — so when you come back in 6 months you know.

Engine packing reference

Engine	Packed map	RGBA layout
Unreal	ORM	R=AO G=Roughness B=Metallic
Unity URP / HDRP	Mask	R=Metal G=AO B=Detail A=Smoothness
Godot 4	ORM	R=AO G=Roughness B=Metallic
glTF	metallicRoughness	G=Roughness B=Metallic

Why not SimpleBake

SimpleBake is excellent for single assets. BakeStation focuses on what it doesn't ship: a real queue, auto cages, engine-correct packing layouts, UDIM, and metadata you can hand off to a tech artist. If you bake at scale, BakeStation pays for itself the first day.

Compatibility

Blender 4.2 LTS and later on Windows / macOS / Linux. Cycles engine for baking (EEVEE for the rest of your scene is fine). GPU bake supported wherever Cycles supports it.

License

GPL-3.0. The textures you bake are yours to ship in any commercial project. No telemetry, no online activation.

1.1.1 — Saving and loading a bake queue no longer throws a Python traceback when the file path is empty or points at a folder. It now says «Choose a file to save the queue to», creates the folder if it is missing, and reports a plain message if the disk refuses the write.