Introduction to Baking in Cycles

In this tutorial you'll discover:

  • The basics of baking and how to get started in minutes

  • How to bake textured objects

  • How to use baking for specific purposes like caustics

What is Baking?

Baking is the process of calculating and saving the cycles light data directly onto the objects themselves. Meaning they can then be viewed in realtime:

This makes it immensely helpful for game development, as well as camera fly through animations.

It works by UV unwrapping the object, creating a blank image and baking the light data onto it.

Download

Some ready made scenes to explore:

Download the baked Lounge Room scene

Enjoy! This ridiculously cool feature is made possible due to the Blender Development Fund. So a big thanks to everyone who donates, not to mention Dalai Felinto who coded this whole thing :)

And here's a tip from Dalai that wasn't in the tutorial: You can select multiple objects and bake them at the same time :)