9.5.2

378 • CHAPTER 7
OBJECTS MENU • PARTICLES • 379
Baking Particles
Under certain conditions it may become necessary to use the Bake Particles command for particle
streams. What does this mean? Under normal conditions particle streams are rendered dynamically
and sequentially, i.e. the position of a particle in the next frame depends on its position in the previous
one. But this can cause problems in two ways ...
First of all let’s consider rendering within mixed networks. With the CINEMA 4D NET Render module,
the rendering of an animation within a network can be distributed over several computers for faster
results. For this type of network rendering a variety of different platforms can be combined, e.g.
Power PC, AMD and Pentium processors. Since the oating-point units (FPU) of these processors
work slightly differently, the sequential nature of the particle rendering can produce different results
on the different platforms. The nal output could be a non-continuous particle stream with large
gaps in parts along the stream. The solution is to bake the particles before rendering them over the
network.
The second problem occurs when using several independent particle systems in a scene. In principle
all modiers will always affect all particles of a scene, no matter what the source. If this is not what
you want, remedy it by baking the particles.
To bake particles:
 In the Object manager, select the emitter and choose Objects > Bake
Particles.
When baked, a particle stream will become frozen in its present condition, i.e. the position, rotation
and size for each particle for each frame of the animation is xed (also in the Timeline, although you
won’t notice it). All computers in a NET Render network will now render the particles correctly.
As you might expect, there is a price to pay for these extra particle options:
high memory consumption. The data — such as position, speed, situation,
lifetime etc. — must be saved for each particle and for each frame. To check
the memory consumption of the baked objects, select the objects and in the
Object manager, choose Objects > Object Information.