Well guy’s I know I should probably know this seeing how long I’ve used Blender. But I must ask this n00b question.
What Is Baking?
I’m just not sure what the actual function of it is. I hope I’m in the right forum to ask this.
Thanks in advance,
-Jimmy
Baking is a general term for speeding up rendering or animation by precalculating the values of some parameter so it doesn’t have to be calculated every time you render or animate. For example you can bake shadows to a texture or vertex colors, or you can bake the vertex coordinates of an animated softbody the first time you run the simulation.
Any Examples?
Here’s a tutorial on baking a radiosity solution to a texture.
The wiki manual has a brief description of baking softbodies.
Another example of baking is simulating rigid body dynamics (rolling, falling, bouncing stuff) in the Game Engine, and baking those movements to IPO curves.
Oh I see.
Thankyou very much for the links and info 
Also, blender’s new fluid simulation has a ‘bake function’. What it does is run through the fluid simualtion, which usually takes hours due to the complexity of fluid bahavior, and then output the fluid object as a mesh file to the disk. Thus when you render a fluid simulation, it no fluid calculation is done, blender simply loads the mesh from the harddrive and display it.