ReliaBake – Bake PBR Maps in Blender Without Freezing or Losing Work (glTF / Godot / Unreal / Unity)

Baking in Blender locks your whole window — and one crash can take the session with it.

ReliaBake bakes every map in a background process. Keep working while it runs, cancel any time, and resume after a crash without re-baking what's already done. Your open .blend is never touched.

• Your file stays safe — bakes from a copy; the open file is never modified.
• Hung bakes get stopped — timeout (auto 3× estimate, min 60 s, or your value); remaining maps keep baking.
• Cancel really cancels — worker terminated, force-killed after 3 s if needed.
• Resume after a crash — only unfinished maps; finished maps re-queued if file deleted/changed (sha256).
• Automatic retry once with conservative settings if a worker crashes.
• No half-written files — .part.png then rename.
• Check UVs before bake — missing UV, overlaps, outside 0–1, zero-area faces; select problem faces.
• Flat-output warning — single flat colour / flat normal (warning only; map still saved).
• Maps: Base Color, Roughness, Metallic, Normal (tangent), AO — each toggleable.
• Engine presets: glTF ORM, Godot ORM, Unreal ORM, Unity URP, Unity HDRP Mask Map.
• DirectX normal (−Y) switch (Unreal preset enables by default).
• Resolution 256–4096 (default 1024); PNG output under //baked/.
• Panel: 3D Viewport ▸ Sidebar (N) ▸ Bake tab. One mesh object per bake.

What you get

• reliabake zip — install in Blender (do not unzip). Full Python source, GPL-3.0-or-later. QW Studio.

Good to know

• Blender 4.2 LTS or newer. Tested on Blender 4.2.23 LTS and 5.2.2 LTS (Linux x64, CPU/Cycles only). Windows and macOS not tested yet. GPU baking isn't used.
• Not in this version: Emission/Alpha maps, selected-to-active (high→low) baking, multi-object batch baking.
• Unreal DirectX normal convention follows community practice; not verified against an Epic official document.