I would like to try to understand if it is possible to bake without the use of the operator, using only Python without operators. If anyone has been able to do such a thing, I'd like to figure out how. This would be really interesting, although I'm afraid the answer is that it can't
1 Answer
See source/blender/editors/object/object_bake_api.c starting at line 1168. Bake uses internal C code that implements operators that are not exported to Python.
So no, you can't bake without using bpy.ops.object.bake
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