Baking Hair and Guides
Baking collapses the procedural changes in part of the operator stack into a stored result. You can bake up to a chosen operator while keeping the operators below it intact. Baking replaces the computed strands at that point with a Baked Hair or Baked Guides operator that simply holds the strands as they were at the moment of baking.
Why bake
- Performance: freezing an expensive part of the stack avoids recomputing it on every change.
- Stability: some operators, such as Normalize Strands Operator, recompute each frame and can flicker during animation; baking captures a clean, fixed result.
- Handing off: a baked groom is a concrete starting point on which to build further, or to export.
How to bake
- Select the operator in the stack at the point you want to bake.
- Use the bake action to collapse the stack up to that operator.
The operators up to that point are replaced by a single baked operator holding their result; the operators below remain editable.
After baking
A baked result behaves like any other strand source: you can continue stacking operators above it. If the baked strands need a surface to deform with, ground them. See Baked Hair, Baked Guides, and Ground Strands.
Related
- Operator Boxing and Unboxing - encapsulate operators without freezing their results.
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