I keep seeing all these references to Bake. Bake a texture, Bake this, Bake that. What is it actually? I saw somewhere that if you bake the right things you can speed up rendering by 150%. So I’m curious as to what this is.
Baking is the pre-computation of something ahead of time, instead of at render time. So, for example, how a fluid moves inside of a container and how it flows around obstructions can be computed ahead of time. Then at render time, the computer only has to compute the color (but not the shape) of the fluid blob. Of course, if you change an ingredient (something that affects the bake), like for example, moving an obstacle in our fluid example, you have to re-bake. This is why workflow is important, because at 75% of the way through your process, you can start baking things overnight, so that as you get closer to completion, your render times do not drag on and on and on…
Thanks Juggler and PapaSmurf. Thats some pretty indepth stuff there. Way down the road for a noob such as I. One day tho, I was just curious since I was seeing it in alot of posts and pages.
let me say that it is really useful to get good textures in the game engine.