Hi,
When I change the “texture baking” setting in the rendering tab. Rhino won’t render anything it just sits there calculating. When I changed the texture bake setting from low to high I waited over a 1/2 hour and nothing rendered no render window popping up, nothing reporting on the command line. When I had the quality to low rendering took five minutes to render. Why is changing this setting killing the rendering process? The setting is at the bottom of the attached image.
RM
In Rhino 7 if you have a Rhino procedural texture in use or use bump/normal mapping in a material and it is assigned to one or more objects with a huge amount of faces it can take a LONG time to bake the textures. And the texture sizes increase quite a bit per quality level, so also take a lot of memory to bake.
In Rhino 8 almost all procedurals are natively implemented, so there is no longer any baking (except for maybe Dots I think).
Hi Nathan,
I’m on V7.
I shut down rhino via task manager because I couldn’t wait any longer. I reopened the same file and set the texture bake quality level to standard and waited 18 minutes and my scene was able to render. I don’t have too many objects with large amounts of faces/polygons and no procedural textures at all, but lots of objects with pbr materials.
Before I set the texture bake quality to high and waited 1/2 hour before stopping. Why can’t I cancel rendering at this phase? And why is there no message telling me that Rhino is going to do something that takes a long amount of time when this setting is changed? I noticed the texture bake quality default setting is “low”. Do I get better renderings if I change texture bake quality to standard or higher? Can you give me a ballpark figure of how long high and ultra might take? I’d wait if I knew it was working. I have a decent machine. See specs.
Thanks for your help, quite decent of you to continue to help on the forum even though you’ve moved on.
RM
Windows 11 (10.0.26200 SR0.0) or greater (Physical RAM: 96Gb)
Computer platform: DESKTOP
Standard graphics configuration.
Primary display and OpenGL: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 (NVidia) Memory: 12GB, Driver date: 3-4-2026 (M-D-Y). OpenGL Ver: 4.6.0 NVIDIA 595.79
> Accelerated graphics device with 4 adapter port(s)
- Windows Main Display attached to adapter port #0
OpenGL Settings
Safe mode: Off
Use accelerated hardware modes: On
Redraw scene when viewports are exposed: On
Graphics level being used: OpenGL 4.6 (primary GPU’s maximum)
Anti-alias mode: 8x
Mip Map Filtering: Linear
Anisotropic Filtering Mode: High
Vendor Name: NVIDIA Corporation
Render version: 4.6
Shading Language: 4.60 NVIDIA
Driver Date: 3-4-2026
Driver Version: 32.0.15.9579
Maximum Texture size: 32768 x 32768
Z-Buffer depth: 24 bits
Maximum Viewport size: 32768 x 32768
Total Video Memory: 12282 MB
Are you sure non of your materials, including pbr materials, have any of the rhino procedural textures? If I recall correctly baking happens only when procedural textures are in use.
It is enough to have one object with many faces (not a mesh object).
Low will give textures with pixel resolution 2048x2048. Then by increasing quality it will be 4096x4096, 8192x8192 and 16672x16672 pixels. That means those are going to be rather… large and will take therefor a lot of memory.
It really depends on your scene. But higher quality means larger textures to bake to means longer time to do all that baking.
That is probably something @Jussi_Aaltonen is better equipped to answer as he wrote the bake code I think. But as mentioned above larger textures means more to bake. And that gets worse when there are many (non-mesh) faces.
NP, the knowledge is still in my head, and I believe in sharing 
Hi @jesterking
Thanks for your help and explanations.
RM
For a fixed object the time to bake is pretty much linear to the number of pixels in the baked texture.
Can you add some command line messages. I think something that takes over 1/2 hour or more to work should have a prompt before it that gives a rough estimate of how long the command would take. Can’t you iterate the textures used and then come up with a message telling users roughly how long it will take and report that at the command line so a user can decide whether to change this option or not. This way we would know if the settings are even possible because now Ultra quality might not even be doable on many systems.
Secondly and this is important why can’t I cancel this command? I have to shut down Rhino from the task manager.
This area seems more like a wip and not fully thought out for the user, having no messages about length of time it might take and not being able to cancel makes this quality setting really cumbersome and worse error prone. Because what if I didn’t save my changes before I hit render and then had to wait hours for it to complete or worse kill rhino from the command line thus losing my changes.
RM
Hi @3dsynergy
Before we add those warning messages I would like to take a look at a model that is especially slow for you.
Do you have any that you could confidentially share with me? Here’s an upload link.
Filed as RH-94719 Render never starts with high ATP quality setting
Sorry I didn’t get back to you sooner I’ve been fighting the new bugs in Twinmotion 2026.
Unfortunately I can’t share this file. But maybe what or audit might show you the amount of textures etc. and I can post that?
Thanks for your interest, explanations and help,
RM
