What is Baking?


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By 45thdiv - 11 Years Ago
Hello,

I have been seeing this in several threads.  Folks talking about Baking and animation.  I did a search on the forum to see if I could find an explanation for this, but no luck.

I see that this task has helped a lot of animations out with regards to collision.

Thanks for the help with this.

By animagic - 11 Years Ago
When using soft cloth physics what iClone is doing is calculating the effect of movement of the cloth, the interaction of the cloth with other objects, etc. For best results you would normally run this simulation By Frame, which is less then real-time, but more precise. 

Therefore, once you are pleased with the result, you can have iClone bake the soft cloth effects into an animation clip for the cloth object. After that you switch soft cloth physics off for that particular object. However, because the animation has been baked, you will still see the cloth effects, which you can now play back real-time.

That is sort of a simple explanation. Baking is just a way to solidify a particular simulation into an animation clip.

By planetstardragon - 11 Years Ago
Hi 45thdiv,


The idea of baking is to consolidate your files to free up resources and capture a moment.

So say for example, you are calculating your physics reactions in real time, the baking process would take a picture of your performance and save it to a file...no more real time calculating.

The same concept also applies to texture baking, where in some softwares you take a snapshot of the character with all HD lighting effects and texture effects ....and save it to a final texture - the advantages is that it saves memory and resources from calculating in real time, the disadvantage is no further tweaking is allowed being that you took a snapshot of a performance.

as an analogy, a photographer bakes real life into a static picture or movie. Or for that matter even a cake, you mix all the ingredients, but once you bake the cake, there is no more mixing.

Cheers.
By 45thdiv - 11 Years Ago
Thank you both.  Now I understand what the meaning is, within a 3D animation world.  It makes sense.