Live or Baked

Each set-up object either solves as you work (Live) or plays frames it has baked (Baked). Both give the same result.

Each object is Baked (the default) or Live, switched beside its name in the Object section.

Both give exactly the same result: Live solves what a bake would store. Use Live to pose, set up a still or tune a setting, and Baked for playback and final renders of an animation. You can switch back and forth; a cache already baked stays, and Baked plays it again.

Update, in Live mode

• On Release (the default) solves once you let go: when a bone drag, a timeline scrub or a slider stops. While you drag you see the last result.
• While Dragging solves at every step of a drag. Smooth on a light mesh; on a heavy one each step waits for the solve.

What it costs, on a full body of 180,772 vertices at subdivision level 2: a live frame is about 1.1 s, against 0.4 s for the character alone. After letting go of a bone the result appears in about 1.5 s. At level 1 a live frame is about 0.5 s.

Every Frame, or frame ranges

Every Frame (the default) solves on every frame. Untick it to give frame ranges, the same ranges Baked mode bakes: Live then solves only inside them, so playing or scrubbing elsewhere is instant. Outside the ranges there is no deformation, in the viewport and in a render, just as an unbaked frame has none in Baked mode, and the panel says so.

What Live does not need

Live does not need Bake, Bake All skips a Live object, and nothing in When to bake again applies to it. Show the subdivision in the viewport at the level you work at: if the viewport's mesh is not the one Set Up saw, Live says so and waits. After changing the subdivision level on purpose, press Set Up again.