---
title: "Baking in Maya"
canonical: "https://rmanwiki-26.pixar.com/space/RFM26/21037142/Baking%20in%20Maya"
format: markdown
---
<span style="color: #000000"> </span>[<span style="color: #000000">Baking</span>](https://renderman.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/REN26/pages/19662127)<span style="color: #000000"> allows users to pre-compute or "bake" pattern networks into 2D texture images or 3D point clouds. </span>

### Bake Patterns

Add [PxrBakeTexture](https://renderman.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/REN26/pages/19661581) or [PxrBakePointCloud](https://renderman.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/REN26/pages/19662125) patterns into your shading network in places where you want to bake that state of the network into a texture or point cloud.  When doing regular renders, baked textures will be used by these patterns, and when doing bake renders, textures will be baked. ie. written to disk.

![image](media://1d683241-a3ba-4f0e-9ca4-9e7890ca043c)

### Starting a Bake Render

A bake render is essentially a batch render with one different setting. It uses the bake Hider instead of the raytrace Hider.   To start a bake render simply choose Bake Render instead of Batch Render from the RenderMan menu.   All the usual [batch render preferences](https://renderman.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/RFM26/pages/21037272/RenderMan+Preferences#RenderManPreferences-BatchPreferences) apply to the bake render.  The baked textures will be written to the locations specified in the individual PxrBakeTexture or PxrBakePointCloud patterns.

![image](media://3cd9f9d3-3e29-43d3-9a18-b4acbc2af535)