Illumination Baking is very useful if you want to do an animation with global illumination or radiosity. It calculates a lighting solution for your scene and saves it to be reused on the materials of the scene. It is used a lot in videogames for example - where they render a scene with a particular lighting environment to use as a background for the rest of objects. Of course, it will work best if your lightsources don't change much and if you don't care about how your moving objects affect the light on the pre-caculated surfaces.

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