"Bake Material Output" node - No more selecting a image node for bakes.

Blender image texture baking is such a tedious workflow when you are working with many materials. I have some suggestions.

I'm first just going to list the sore spots:

• Selecting the output image is done by selecting the image node inside a material, instead of having a property somewhere on the object. It is way too easy to accidentally leave the wrong node selected when making tweaks.

• Making use of the bake by hooking the image up to an different shader node requires doing so for every single material. And then back again when you need to change something in your bake.

• The bake menu and button is tucked away inside the settings panel that is global , the bake button should be moved to the top render menu, for easy access.

The only way I have found to get around this limitation and restore my sanity is using a single mega texture for the entire scene and painting in the properties rather than using separate materials.

Solution - "Bake Material Output" node

My idea is to have an node similar to the "Material Output" node that is prioritised when in a baking context.

The inputs would be the same as Material Output, but have a few extra fields:

• Image output: the image that the material will get rendered into.

• Most of the settings from "Render Properties -> Bake"

No more swapping materials when rebaking.