Bake and Cache
A live run simulates as you play and is for previewing. A bake simulates a frame range deterministically and writes it to the cache, so you can scrub and render it. The Bake & Cache panel controls baking.
Frame range
Section titled “Frame range”- Use Scene Range (on by default) bakes the scene’s start and end frames.
- Turn it off to set your own Start and End.
Blaze mode
Section titled “Blaze mode”For a Blaze graph, the panel shows the Simulation Output node’s Mode.
| Mode | What Run and Bake do |
|---|---|
| Live | Interactive preview. Nothing is cached unless Bake on Preview is on. |
| Bake | Bakes VDB frames at the simulation resolution, with velocity and rest grids. |
| Bake + Upres | Bakes, then adds wavelet detail at 2x, 3x or 4x. |
| Upres from Cache | Re-runs only the upres over an existing bake. |
For the two upres modes, the panel shows the Upres factor and Upres Turbulence. See Bake, upres and checkpoints.
Buttons
Section titled “Buttons”| Button | When it shows | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Bake Frame Range | always (Bake + Upres in that mode) | Bakes the range. Press Esc or click Cancel Bake to stop early. Frames baked so far are kept. |
| Upres Cached Bake | Mode is Upres from Cache | Re-runs the upres over the cached bake. The simulation is not re-run. |
| Keep as Bake | Mode is Live, after pausing | Promotes the frames a live run cached to be the bake. |
| Resume Bake | Checkpoints exist | Continues an interrupted bake from its last checkpoint. |
| Re-bake from Here | Checkpoints exist | Re-simulates from the checkpoint at or before the current frame. |
| Clear Cache | always | Deletes all cached frames from disk and memory. |
| Purge All | always | Removes all BLUX simulation objects, caches, materials, collections and node groups. Asks to confirm. |
Purge All deletes the generated objects (BLUX_Render, BLUX_Blaze, BLUX_Chunk_*), the fracture collection, generated materials and node groups, and the disk caches. Your own modelling meshes are not touched.
What is cached
Section titled “What is cached”Three rows report the cache:
- Cached: the range of frames and how many there are.
- Memory: the in-memory cache against its budget.
- Disk: the disk cache.
Budgets are set in the add-on preferences. When a cap is reached, the least recently used frames are evicted first.