I can understand how baking is good for shadows, because shadows stay where they are on a surface regardless of the angle of view.
But reflections will move across a surface as you change your angel of view, so it puzzled be how they can be baked. Yet when I did bake a reflective surface, a reflection did appear, but not in the shape you’d expect from seeing the scene with ‘live’ reflections, and it looked quite orthographic.
How does blender work out baked reflections? Is it based on normals? does the render camera have something to do with it? Surely baked reflections are useless if the camera moves? Thanks.
Only baked reflections I can think of is baked reflection probes which are then added as an emission shader with no actual reflections. Imagine a ball in a kitchen scene; bake out the hemi from ball position and add it as an emission shader using reflected coords. This will appear as reflections and will rotate accordingly with your camera and object moves, but what appears as reflections will not update live. So that table beneath the ball will still show up in reflections if ball is moved to corner of room.
If you play Fallout4, look at Codsworths reflections during chargen - it’s the same room probe everywhere. It’s a normal trick to blend probes from one environment type to the next.
It’s “useless” if realism is the goal, but awesome for speed and game engines. I used to fade real reflections with mapped ones based on the distance of the reflected traced ray, but I haven’t been able to do that blend in Cycles (no way of doing intersection checks).