What exactly is texture baking? What role does this play in the game making process?

Map baking is just a technique to render the maximum illumination information into a map, and then paste the baked map back into the scene. In this way, the lighting information becomes a map, and the CPU does not need to do time-consuming calculations, but only needs to calculate ordinary maps, so it is extremely fast.

Because the scene needs to be rendered before baking, texture baking technology has little meaning for still frames. This technology is mainly used for games and architectural roaming animation. This technology realizes the practicability of applying time-consuming radiosity calculation to animation, and also saves the annoying trouble of animation jitter during radiosity. Texture baking technology was added in max5, and the interface in max6 was slightly changed. It has been done quite well in max7.