Would you only do this if you were to not move your objects? Is this faster? I'm trying to understand why I'd do this to an object and at what point to I bake the GI to it. Is it something you do to individual objects once everything is placed?

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.

Any real benefit to stills?

"Any real benefit to stills?" Faster render times, Ryan. Cheers

I have never messed with i myself,but does it sacrifice quality for faster renders? Maybe give the image a more generic look?

Well, I just rendered some animation with the illumination baking & it seems to make very little impact on render times if you want your image to look the same as the still. At 100% it looked terrible. At 300% it looked very similar, so did the time factor. They suggest stepping up the threshold in the manual. If you can live with a very rough version maybe it's good. Got any tips Cheers, would like to know your setup.

After playing around with the illumination baking for a while I couldn't really see what true benefit there was to it.
So I ran a quick test. One small plane & a cube in a GI atmosphere. Both baked to polys to enable the illumination baking.Tracked the camera towards them for a few seconds.

Normal animation setting - after 5 frames - 50mins approximation

Illumination baked(25% quality) - after 5 frames - 2hr20min approximation

The baked version also looked awful because of the low baking threshold. So what is with this illumination baking?
It not going to be any use to me like this!Can someone else maybe try a similar experiment to see if it's just me?

Ok, sorry for the delay in the reply...firstly, illumination baking really only has any benefit with GI and GR and after baking there is no need to use a GI or GR atmosphere. In your tests did you still have GI or GR enabled after baking?...otherwise, there is not much point in baking the objects ;) Cheers

So one could essentially bake everything in his scene and use a standard atmosphere? Nice!

Thanks Cheers. Doh, didn't reason that one out! Will run it by again to see what happens. I imagine all will be well now!

Thats correct Ryan...in theory that is how it's suppose to work...games use it a lot now to get that radiosity look without using radiosity...in fact most films use baking also. Depending on the project studios have to contend with deadlines...imagine creating an animation with radiosity and having a calculated render time of, lets say, 6 hrs per frame at 30 fps covering an animation length of 5 minutes = 9000 frames = 54000 cpu hrs (2250 days). Now without baking you can imagine that most animations wouldn't even make the storyboard lol. Now, cut that render time to 1 hr (and thats a cautious estimate; could be as little as 30mins or less) it would take 375 days (9000cpu hrs)...but remember that a place such as Sony Imageworks has about 2000 cpu's at it's disposal...within 4hrs it would be done ;) That's an extreme example of how it can cut render time, but for anybody on a deadline (or just impatient to see the fruits of their work), it has great benefits. Cheers

Ok, now Vue has made me look an idiot: just done a test and baked illumination is slower for me in Vue...this is not how it's suppose to work! I will do a few tests over the weekend and delve into the manual and see if I can sort this out. Keep tuned...oh and E-on, if this is true, then shame on you. Cheers

Cheers, just did what you suggested previously & it looks washed out as in a standard atmosphere. I then plucked the waterwheel from the objects section & baked it. Kept the atmosphere the same & it went fast. Perhaps my cube setup was cranky on the previous test. So keep the GI/GR & bake high. The manual suggests that it renders the first frame & that once it has done that then the rest of the frames fall in behind. Gotta go read a bedtime story to my daughter, so will check back later!