Speed up baking texture?

[nullbio]

I do a lot of realism work that requires high-res baking textures, and a big part of the approach to finding realistic results is "tweak value -> re-render". With a heavy baking texture in my material, this takes FOREVERRRRR. It slows everything down so much, as it seems every change I make to the material, even regardless of being a change that would change the baking texture, causes the node to re-bake. Is there any way to speed up this workflow? Turning the resolution down on the baking texture isn't really an option, as having it high-res is part of making it look realistic and a big part of getting the final result correct.

[bepeg4d]

Hi,
to minimize the impact, after the Baking texture node has been calculated, you could uncheck the Enable baking option in Baking Texture node, and enable it only when you need to recalculate the baked texture.

ciao,
Beppe

[nullbio]

Thanks Bepe, is my understanding correct that it's rebaking any time anything on the material changes, not just nodes that are connected through the baking texture? I.e. I adjust a octane gradient on my diffuse channel, but my baking texture is on the displacement and completely disconnected from the diffuse, will it trigger a re-bake? That seems to be the behaviour I'm getting at the moment, so just want to double check. And if this is the case, I take it that it's not possible for the Octane plugin to detect if changes are coming from a node further up from it's connected tree to determine if it should re-bake? Seems like something that should happen automatically on the surface, as an optimization.