You need to override the context. AFAIK setting area.type
does not work.
Baking cloth is very similaroverride the context for the operator to baking fluid or smokework.
This question has already been asked for smoke and fluid, so I will quote one of the answerssimilar to this answer on baking fluid or smoke here:
Baking smoke is very similar to baking fluid, so I will quote brecht's answer:
It's a bit more complicated than it could be because fluid simulating baking is only exposed as an operator. That means it expects an active object in the context, which is usually provided by the user interface that is not available in background mode.
However, it is possible to override context manually, see the api docs.
So for a smoke simulation:
import bpy for scene in bpy.data.scenes: for object in scene.objects: for modifier in object.modifiers: if modifier.type == 'SMOKE': if modifier.smoke_type == 'DOMAIN': override = {'scene': scene, 'active_object': object, 'point_cache': modifier.domain_settings.point_cache} bpy.ops.ptcache.bake(override, bake=True) break
This will bake the selected cache for all domain objects in the file.
Using the simple script below which is adapted from the script in the above quote (which is in turn adapted from brecht's answer about baking fluid), you can bake the cloth cache for every object in the file which has a cloth modifier like this:
import bpy
for scene in bpy.data.scenes:
for object in scene.objects:
for modifier in object.modifiers:
if modifier.type == 'CLOTH':
overridewith =bpy.context.temp_override(scene=scene,
{'scene': scene, 'active_object': object, 'point_cache': modifier.point_cache}
bpy.ops.ptcache.bake(override active_object=object,
bake=True point_cache=modifier.point_cache):
break bpy.ops.ptcache.bake(bake=True)