One-Click PBR Bake & Export

One-Click PBR Bake & Export is a Blender addon that extracts every PBR texture map from complex Principled BSDF material setups with a single button press. It handles channel isolation, baking, file output, and channel packing automatically so you can focus on creating materials rather than wrestling with bake configurations.

Version: 1.0.0 | Blender: 4.2+ | Author: StraySpark

Feature Overview

Feature	Details
PBR Channels	11 channels: Base Color, Roughness, Metallic, Normal, AO, Emission, Alpha, Displacement, Curvature, Thickness, World Normal
Output Formats	PNG 8-bit, PNG 16-bit, EXR 32-bit, JPEG
Engine Presets	4 built-in presets: UE5 Standard, Unity Standard, Web/Low-Res, Film/High-Res
Channel Packing	ORM packing (AO + Roughness + Metallic) and fully custom R/G/B/A packing
Batch Baking	Multi-object baking with shared or per-object output directories
Blender Version	4.2 and above
Dependencies	Zero -- no external libraries or add-on requirements

How It Works

The addon uses a four-stage pipeline to extract each PBR map:

1. Channel Isolation -- For each enabled channel, the addon temporarily rewires the target input from the Principled BSDF node into a temporary Emission shader. This isolates the channel data so Cycles can bake it as a flat color/value pass.
2. Cycles Bake -- The addon invokes the Cycles render engine to bake the isolated channel onto the target image texture at the configured resolution and sample count.
3. Node Tree Restoration -- After each channel bake completes, the addon restores the original node connections. The material is left exactly as it was before the bake started.
4. File Output -- Baked images are saved to the configured output directory in the selected format (PNG, EXR, or JPEG) with proper color space tagging and bit depth.

Channels that use native Cycles bake types (Normal, AO, World Normal) bypass the Emission rewiring step and use the built-in bake passes directly.

Quick Start

Get your first set of PBR textures baked in under 2 minutes:

1. Install the addon and enable it in Blender Preferences
2. Select an object with a Principled BSDF material
3. Open the N-Panel and switch to the PBR Bake tab
4. Choose an engine preset (UE5 Standard is a good default)
5. Set your output directory
6. Click BAKE ALL

For the full walkthrough, see Getting Started.

Next Steps

• Getting Started -- Installation and first bake tutorial
• Channels -- All 11 PBR channels documented
• Engine Presets -- UE5, Unity, Web, and Film presets
• Channel Packing -- ORM and custom texture packing
• Batch Baking -- Bake multiple objects at once
• API Reference -- Operator and property reference