Is this a step that should be done or does it not really help that much?

Baking what? Primitives, booleans? Illumination?
Depends...

For example i have the sky deck from stonemason for vue, do i need to bake it - if so do i bake all of it - parts of it?

in general - what should you bake? when should you bake?

I don't bother baking anything but then I only render stills not animations.

so baking is more for animation? if so i guess i wont need it as i do stills too

about the only time I'd probably use it is for baking metablobs to meshes - no doubt some of the other gurus will chime in sooner or later though

Thanks Frank - thats a nice city you live in ;) shame the two footballs teams suck :D

:biggrin:  Yup, fortunately I prefer motorsport.  Footie leaves me cold

Ok, Baking:
1- Baking to polygons= transforming a primitive (cube, sphere) into a polygonal object. Also used to transform abolean object made out of 2 different object into a single one. Same process for metablobs.
2- Illumination baking= the process of transforming the indirect illumination of an object into a texture map that will be applied to the object, saving incredible amounts of rendering time for animations.
If you were wondering about #2, it is only usuful for animations, and only when ligting conditions are consistent. The illumination baking process can be pretty long, but only done once for every object, which will save time on thousands of frames.
If you do still renders, no need for illumination baking.
If #1, transforming primitives into poloygonal objects is useless in Vue, since you cannot edit polygons in Vue. It's not a modeller. Baking metablobs and booleans to polygons on the other hand can lead to faster render times, but on rare occasions to errors in the resulting mesh.

I understand it a little better now - thanks all

 I was hoping baking meant all the textures would join up on the object to make the multiple textures into one texture so I then could apply a variation to the whole dressed poser person.
Love esther
PS anyway baking crashes my puter

I was hoping baking meant someone was making cookies

I was going to say something about cakes but felt an unusual amount of restraint   :b_lipssealed:

Kept me gob shut till now

:b_grin:

cookies!!!! nom nom nom nom!!!!!!!