February 27th, 2009 | 
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After adding texture to your objects, it is time to add lighting and shadow effects, a good way of adding these effects to your texture so that you don’t have to render them at every frame in your animations is to “Bake the Texture”.
Baking is a technical term that allows the lighting and shadow settings to be saved ontop of your original texture. It basically renders the effect onto the existing texture so that you dont need to render these are run-time. More realism, with less clock cycles. Careful though, don’t bake shadows onto things that will move (its best to bake texture on buildings and terrain), as it wont look right.
In order to do this, add lights and set up your scene. When you are finished, open up the rendering dialogue and render to texture, this will rewrite your .jpg texture so that lights and shadows are now “baked”/stored in the image.
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