Baking
 

people mention this term quite a lot, and it appears in maya quite a lot, but what does baking mean?

storing info in cache so it does not have to recalculate every time.

ok, erm, so, eh? :confused:
can you bake an animation if youre using trax?

I could be wrong but I think it's regarding stuff like Dynamics and particles. Stuff like gravity, forces, particle collisions do not have to be calculated everytime (which slows your computer performance).

oh yer that wud make sense actually, you can bake fur attributes
but whats the point in it? because even if its stored and played back then it wud still slow the computer

straight from the maya docs:
"Baking a simulation allows you to generate a single animation curve for an object whose actions are being provided by simulation rather than by keys and animation curves (keysets). Many types of animation in Maya are not represented by, and therefore not available for, keyset editing. Examples include objects animated with inverse kinematics, by expressions, or along motion paths.

Baking a simulation is useful when you want to edit a single animation curve instead of all the contributing attributes that affect the behavior of a single attribute. Examples: an object affected by a driven key or an expression."

texture baking
 

baking can also be (burning) lights effects into a texture, or making other textures out of a complex procedural shader, which sometime it can be a time saver...

go explore -> hypershade/edit/convert to file texture ..

I thought baking was women's thing :p

"Meesa Maya...Yousa bake me dinner!" :D

well my characte rin trax, can i bake his arms (hmm, sounds weird) and have them load into a new graph on its own so ic an edit it seperately?