BakeAIR is a special-purpose renderer for recording or "baking" shading and lighting results into texture maps. The baked texture maps can be used for rapid re-rendering with a software renderer such as AIR or for real-time hardware-accelerated rendering.

A typical 3D renderer such as AIR produces a 2D image based on a 3D-to-2D projection of a scene. BakeAIR instead rasterizes individual primitives in texture space, recording shading information into one or more texture maps.

BakeAIR provides great flexibility in the baking process:

Almost any value of interest can be baked: color, opacity, position, normal, tangents, indirect lighting, and any shader output variable.

Values can be recorded at 8-bit, 16-bit, or floating-point precision.

A single primitive can bake multiple values to different maps, and each map can be shared among multiple primitives.

Any user-defined texture coordinates can be used for baking.

Map size, exposure, quantization, sampling, and filtering are definable on a per-map basis.

BakeAIR is built on the AIR core and shares all applicable AIR features, including programmable shading, indirect illumination, ray tracing, soft shadows, caustics, and advanced filtering and anti-aliasing. BakeAIR reads files in RIB format.

BakeAIR is ideal for producing texture maps for accelerating software rendering, visualization, games, or digital content creation. SiTex Graphics recommends MayaMan and Maya as an interface for BakeAIR.