Return to Revisions

You need to override the context. AFAIK setting area.type does not work.

Baking cloth is very similar to baking fluid or smoke.
This question has already been asked for smoke and fluid, so I will quote one of the answers 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.

You can then run this python script in blender with

blender --background /path/to/file.blend --python /path/to/script.py

Or the short way:

blender -b /path/to/file.blend -P /path/to/script.py

Using the simple script below which is adapted the script in the above quote (which is in turn adapted from Brecht's answer about baking fluid), you bake the cloth cache for every object in the file:

import bpy

for scene in bpy.data.scenes:
    for object in scene.objects:
        for modifier in object.modifiers:
            if modifier.type == 'CLOTH':
                override = {'scene': scene, 'active_object': object, 'point_cache': modifier.point_cache}
                bpy.ops.ptcache.bake(override, bake=True)
                break