The bake controls
The Bake button and its menu, the progress bar, every status the box can show, Auto Bake and Draft.
The bake controls sit at the top of the simulation's panel: the Bake button with its menu, Auto Bake and Draft under it, and the status box. How a bake works explains what a bake is; this page is every control in turn.
Bake
Bake works out the scene's whole frame range and writes it to the cache folder. While it runs, the button becomes a progress bar with a stop button:
| The bar says | Means |
|---|---|
| Starting… | No frame is done yet |
| Frame 42 of 250 · 1 min left | Frames are going; the time left is from the frames so far |
| Frame 42 of 250 · 12 s on this frame | A frame is taking more than two seconds: the count shows it's still working |
The particle count under the bar is the count after the last finished frame. The status bar at the bottom of the window shows the same progress ("Particles: frame 42 of 250") with its own stop button.
Blender stays free to use while a bake runs: you can play the frames already baked, and select and look at other things.
Stop
The stop button stops the bake after the frame it's on. Frames finished are kept: the status says "Baked to frame N of M", and Continue carries on.
The Bake menu
The ⌄ beside the Bake button:
| Item | Does |
|---|---|
| Bake to Frame N | Bakes from the start up to the frame you're on: a quick look at the start. Greyed out on the last frame, and outside the frame range |
| Continue to the End | Carries a bake that stopped short on to the scene's last frame. Only when it stopped on a frame with a state save |
| Re-bake From Frame N | Keeps the frames before N and bakes from N with the settings as they are now. N is the frame after the last state save before the frame you're on |
| Bake in Background | A switch: on, the Bake button bakes in a separate Blender. See Background bakes |
| Bake All | Bakes every simulation in the scene, in the background. Only with more than one. See Several simulations |
| Free Bake | Deletes this simulation's bake from the cache folder. It shows nothing until baked again |
The status box
Under the buttons, a box says where the bake stands:
| Status | Means |
|---|---|
| Not baked yet | No bake: the particles object shows nothing |
| Baked, frames 1–250 | The bake covers the scene's range and matches the settings |
| Baked to frame 120 of 250 | The bake stops before the scene's last frame: it was stopped, baked to a frame, or the range grew since |
| Draft baked, frames 1–250 | A Draft bake. Bake again with Draft off for the final |
| Changed since the bake (red) | Something the bake depends on changed. It still plays; bake again to see the change. See what marks a bake old |
Under the status: the particle count at the bake's last frame, and where it ran and how long it took ("Ran on the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 in 2 min", or "Ran on the CPU: …" with the reason it wasn't the GPU). A background bake adds its result here too.
When there's a quick way on, a button follows the box:
- Continue, when the bake stopped short of the scene's end;
- Re-bake From N, when the bake is out of date and has a state save before the frame you're on. Move to the first frame that should change, and it keeps everything before.
Auto Bake
Auto Bake bakes again by itself a moment after any change the bake depends on, up to the frame you're on, so each change shows as you make it. Moving to a later frame bakes on to it, once you stop on that frame. A bake running when something changes stops and starts again.
Auto Bake bakes in this Blender, as the Bake button does. It's quickest with small simulations, or with Draft on. Turn it off before a big final bake, so a stray click doesn't start it over.
Draft
Draft bakes a quick preview of smoke and liquids: half the detail, so an eighth of the cells or particles, and the Fast liquid surface. It takes a fraction of the time. The switch shows only when the simulation has a Smoke Source or a Liquid; other simulations bake at full detail anyway.
The status box says Draft baked, so a draft isn't mistaken for the final. Turn Draft off and bake again for the final. Settings that Draft changes are marked Draft in the settings tables.
Related
- How a bake works
- State saves and carrying on
- Messages: what each message after a bake means
Using values
Recipes for values each particle carries: count bounces and change on the third, give each particle its own weight, colour particles in a shader by a value, and check a value at a frame.
State saves and carrying on
How a bake saves the whole simulation every few frames, so it can carry on from the middle with the same result.