Bake High to Low

Trigger

Use this skill when the user:

• Wants a tangent-space normal map from a dense source onto a game-resolution mesh
• Mentions cage bake, use_selected_to_active, cage_extrusion, or bpy.ops.object.bake
• Has an LOD from DECIMATE COLLAPSE (or a retopo) and needs the missing surface detail in a map
• Is about to call bake from EEVEE, on GPU in CI, or with bake_type=

This skill is the bake step. It composes ai-mesh-cleanup (identity scale, applied transforms, a UV layer that already exists) and the LOD contract in examples/lod-decimate-chain/ / snippets/decimate_to_budget.py (collapse onto a budget; UVs survive well enough to bake). It does not unwrap, transfer UVs, or pack an atlas — those are a later phase. It does not generate meshes.

The core misunderstanding

Baking is not a render. EEVEE has no bake path. The operator writes into an Image Texture node in the active object's material, not into a file and not into "the selected image datablock." The node it picks is the material's active texture node, and on 5.x that node must also be selected. The active-texture node is the Image Texture node most recently made nodes.active, or the first one created if none ever was. Making a non-texture node (Principled, Output) active later does not move it.

The safe pattern sets both: nodes.active = tex and tex.select = True. The failure modes are not equally loud. Measured on 4.5.11 LTS and 5.2.1 LTS (the selection rows also on 5.0.1 and 5.1.2):