Baking transfers the illumination of baked objects into an image file (if you bake to textures) or data (if you bake to vertices) that you can later apply to objects. After baking, you can simplify the scene by removing lights, materials, and textures (shading networks), because the game engine renderer obtains color and illumination information from the baked image or the data produced. See
Bake color and illumination to textures.
When to bake objects
- To accelerate time and processor-intensive
baking, particularly for complex shading networks or if global illumination features are involved.
- To optimize
baked textures or vertices for use on simpler display devices (such as a console game rendering engine).
- To achieve lighting effects that would otherwise be difficult to achieve in other ways.
- Export to a platform that does not support certain shading effects. For example, some graphic APIs only support a limited number of lights, and many platforms have a limited amount of texture memory available. If you bake the effects of the lights and textures onto the geometry, the lights and textures can then be removed from the scene.