Baking Question: Can render>bake speed up my render?

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1

I am currently working on (of course) a large scene and have some materials with emission on and indirect lighting settings. Rendering one signle frame of the animation on blender took 44 minutes and about 40 of that was “occlusion preprocessing”. The animation will be about 300-400 frames long and has a lot of emission objects in.

Is there any way I can use this strange bake panel in render settings to speed things up? I tried obviously selecting “emission” and bake, and it drew a white patch and then quit with the message “feedback loop detected”. Does this just bake one single frame? All of the lights in the scene are static except for maybe a sun light which shines through moving clouds to make nice shadows on the landscape, although I’d make that a static object if it meant I could cut those 40 minutes down a fair chunk!

2

Baking means precalculating things and saving the result in some other form. In this case, you are making a texture image of values the object has or receives.
Feedback loop occurs when you try to bake on to assigned image where all or some of the information originates. You have your UV coordinates, edit mode, select all, and then create a new image (that gets assigned to those UV’s), bake, save the result, use the result.

3

So is there a way it can speed up such emission-slowed-down renders? Or not? Thats really the crux of the issue, no point learning it if its not going to provide any benefit XD