Yeah, I second most of what's been said.

I wanted to add that LightWave can bake textures.

Also want to add that baking procedurals to an image is useful if you're network rendring across multiple cpu's with different chips, P3/P4/Core 2/AMD, as often they'll each calculate the procedurals slightly differently, which can be an issue if they're changing ever frame.

Its also helpful to bake off procedurals because they're typically much more render intensive than image maps. The downside is that you lose the open ended res of the procedurals and are left with a res capped image.

Lastly, if you know certain lights that will be unchanged in a scene, global lights and such, you can often bake them to your textures, to reduce the light calculations necessary come final render. Also, some people will bake off an ambient occlusion pass to add to their textures when they're not using radiostiy to give a little extra depth to things.

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Lightwave | Blender | Marmoset | GIMP | Krita