[erichocean]

> Could you explain what "baking" means in computer graphics?

It means that the code/configuration used to produce a particular result (e.g. an animation sequence) isn't accessible anymore, but the result is.

For example, Houdini (http://www.sidefx.com) lets you procedurally animate 3D geometry, using a collection of nodes, scripts, etc. This is very useful for authoring, but is extremely heavy when all you want to do is render the resulting animation.

So, you "bake" the animation to a file (Alembic is a popular option today, which Houdini supports) and then you use the baked file during your rendering. None of the code and computation that produced the animation need to be available to the renderer.

Put another way: "baking" is the CG term for "memoizing" the result of a computational process.