I need a new feature: baking with Cycles.
And I want a pony; what’s the use of starting this topic anyway?
Blender is unusable, we need more features now!!
Blender is not fit for professional use.
Well, on a serious note, I think Endi really wants that feature.
Finally GI in Blender and he’s mostly doing games. There are not too many good alternatives, especially F(OSS) to bake textures.
I am sure it will be there eventually but with the focus being on Mango it could take quite a long time I am afraid…
On the other hand, who knows, maybe baking is just what they need to keep rendertimes down?
xNormal ftw
Good luck placing lights in an environment and baking AO maps, lightmaps and shadowmaps with xNormal 
Actually, you can bake AO maps… But yeah. Cycles baking would be nice. I don’t think we’ll be getting it any time soon though. I wonder how difficult it would be to code. I guess it would involve making a special type of ‘camera’ that takes mesh geometry and a UV sets and shoots rays along the normal vectors? No idea how difficult that would be to code, depends on how Cycles cameras work.
arexma - I know that Cycles is missing some features but we have to remember that’s it’s mostly one man project. People should keep that in mind instead of sending requests like “I need baking”, “I need displacement”. It’s just annoying.
I know, I did not fail to see the irony in your and the others posts. Just saying, I think Endi is serious the first time ever calling for a “new” feature 
And him supposedly being serious just makes it all that more hilarious.
Who doesn’t need cycles baking? -.-
Frankly I have never used baking textures except AO; I would be greatful for explaining why do you need them so much (and it’s not an irony). Is it useful for non-game projects? I would be greatful for some practical examples.
When making animations, to speed up your rendering, do not do raytracing on background objects, bake them, then reuse the same texture in all frames.
And why pray tell are you qualifying it like that? Because you’re personally not interested in creating realtime content? There are lots and lots of people and indie studios doing interactive stuff that would be able to benefit from cycles if it could bake. Right now cycles is neat but kinda useless to them.
Relax, I just don’t do anything involving realtime and I’m just curious if I could use baking textures in my projects anywhere.
I was recently trying to bake maps on a armchair model, sculpting the model at really high res and baking maps with Blender internal, then switching to Cycles and use them. I didn’t have enough time to finish it…is it not possible? Can’t i bake with BI and use them in Cycles?
Well then. Archiviz people often render flyarounds. If you can bake a lightmap with indirect lighting only, you could set your bounces to 0 and see your render times cut by a factor of 10. If you could additionally control bounces per material or per object, or if you separate your foregrounds by using layers/passes for your scene you could also use lightmaps on backgrounds in more dynamic scenes. It’d always be a compromise between performance and quality, but that’s often preferable to rendering for a month or three.
@marcoG_ita: Depends on the type of maps you were trying to bake. Normal maps don’t work in cycles for instance. You’ll have to use a reasonably high poly model and bumps instead.
Mmm i know about normals, anyways, the fact it’s feasible is what I was asking for, thanks!
Cheers
MadMinstrel - OK, I get it, but for still images baking textures is not very usefull? Or may it help in the process of creating textures?