Groom Bake

You can use the Groom Bake modifier to save information output from a modifier or chain of modifiers to an XPD cache file. The Groom Bake modifier provides a pointer to this data for other modifiers to use. This way, XGen reads the data from disk rather than processing it for other Modifiers. When active in a modifier chain, Groom Bake deactivates all modifiers below it in the chain. For previews or renders, the primitive generator reads the XPD file created by the Groom Bake modifier rather than computing data from these modifiers. Modifiers that follow the Groom Bake in the chain remain active, and read the data from the XPD file. Use a Groom Bake modifiers improves render time especially when a number of Modifiers are used in the Description. You can only add one instance of a Groom Bake modifier to a Description.

Place Groom Bake Modifiers in a modifier chain when:

• An animation-based modifier such as Plane Anim. In this case, place the Groom Bake modifier before the animation-based modifier. When rendering, only the animation data from each frame needs to processed rather than for all modifiers in the chain.
• Alembic geometry is used in the modifier such as Mesh Cut.
• Passing data through the production pipeline.

Avoid using the Groom Bake modifier for Descriptions that:

• Generate large number of spline primitives.
• Use a large number of proxies shapes such as an archived tree primitive.

In both cases the resulting XPD files are large and can be slow to load.

 Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License