Baking and exporting

The workflow

1. Preview live. Press Run. Tune the graph until it looks right. Live runs are for previewing and are not cached (unless Bake on Preview or Live Gas Preview is on).
2. Bake. Press Bake to simulate a frame range deterministically and write it to the cache. See Bake and Cache.
3. Mesh and sync. After a bake, BLUX syncs the render mesh for particle results. Liquid surfaces are meshed during the bake, one PLY per frame.
4. Scrub and render. The cached frames play back from the timeline and render with Cycles or EEVEE.
5. Export. Send the result to other software from the Export panel.

By solver

Solver	Bake produces	Typical export
Blaze	OpenVDB frames with density, temperature, flame, fuel and velocity	OpenVDB Sequence, or a spritesheet
Hydro	Particle frames, a surface PLY per frame, and whitewater PLY per frame	Alembic or PLY
Atom	Particle frames (and surface PLYs for liquids)	Alembic or PLY
Impact	Shard motion	Baked object keyframes (see below)

Impact to keyframes

To get ordinary animation out of an Impact simulation, use Keyframes > Bake in the Solver panel. It writes location and quaternion rotation keyframes on the shards. Clear removes them and restores the rest poses.

Archives

Save .npz writes the cache as a compressed archive. Load .npz loads one into a session, giving instant timeline scrubbing without re-simulating. Use it to hand a bake to another machine or to keep a result with a project.

Rebuilding without re-simulating

You can change some things after a bake, without simulating again:

Change	Use
The liquid surface settings	Remesh Surface
The whitewater settings	Resimulate Whitewater
Blaze upres settings	Upres from Cache mode, then Upres Cached Bake
The Blaze Look	Just edit it. Shading is applied at render time.

Interrupted bakes

A Blaze bake writes checkpoints every 10 frames by default. After a crash, a cancel or a power cut, Resume Bake continues from the last checkpoint. See Bake, upres and checkpoints.

Rendering on another machine

Baked frames are files on disk. For a render farm:

1. Bake on the workstation, or load an archive.
2. Make sure the cache folder is reachable on the render machine at the path the .blend file expects. When you save, the cache moves next to the file’s own cache.
3. Render with blender -b yourfile.blend -a. No solver process or GPU simulation is needed, because the render reads files.

Liquid surfaces are streamed from PLY files through Geometry Nodes, so they render the same way.

Cleaning up

• Clear Cache deletes cached frames.
• Purge All removes everything BLUX made in the scene, including objects, materials and node groups, but leaves your own meshes.
• The cache has disk and memory budgets. See Cache and budgets.