"Bake" all Particle systems into their object I have a blender project setup, it is simply a building and a pond that are sitting on a sculpted ground plane. The ground plane has several particle systems setup on it: big and little trees (for a forest), two kinds of grass, some reeds around the edge of the pond.
Then I have a camera that does a dolly move around the bank of the pond, while facing the building. The way the particle systems are setup is: a few parents and very many children that are generated at the time of render. All of the particles are static, (they don't change in any way through the extent of the dolly move).

So when rendering the ground plane particles have to be generated for EVERY frame of the animation even though the particles don't move or anything.

My question is this: is there a way for the children particles to be generated for the first frame and used again and again for the full duration of the animation?

I've done a lot of searching for baking in Blender, but that only has to do with textures (from what I've read). I've searched for "precompiling particles" but that didn't yield anything along the lines of what I was wanting. As you can tell, I'm not even sure what terminology I should be using. Any advice would be appreciated!

Here's a low frame-rate and "rough draft" of my animation: enter link description here
You can turn particles into real objects with the convert button in the particles modifier panel.

In this case I think what you may be looking for is BVH caching. Under Render Properties there is a Performance panel. There you will find an option to cache BVH. Blender internal has some different options.

From the 2.62 Release notes -


  For renders where only the camera or materials are changing, while meshes stay fixed, it is now possible to skip the sometimes slow BVH step, by enabling BVH Cache in the Performance panel. This will store the BVH on disk for subsequent (animation) renders of the same scene. Note that if the scene does change in the animation, enabling this option will make rendering somewhat slower.


From your sample animation this may not help as the mesh objects in the scene appears to be changing, unless you are making the materials transparent. If you do have this enabled then maybe disabling it will help.

One possibility may be to render the background animation and then composite the shed animation onto it. Another is to animate material transparency instead of object visibility.