I am texture baking a home scene.
the samples are 500
the texture bake size is 5120x5120
computer specs:
AMD 6 core 3.1Ghz
GTX 760
im in thinking it’ll take about 6 hours?
It could take 6 hrs, 60 hrs, 60 mins !!
It depends on the render settings, scene complexity, lighting and materials being used etc
Render it and tell us how long it took
I wasnt home when it rendered but by the time i got back it was done, I have to assume it took 3 hours
(left at 9am came home at 12pm)
Is there a way to get a timer for texture baking? there is a timer for regular rendering but not for texture baking…
Typically, rendering takes about twice-as-much time as you have. :yes:
But seriously … the two best ways to control render-time (from an “overall project” point of view …) is to (a) use compositing as a primary component of your workflow, and then (b) simplify each render as much as you possibly can.
Think of it this way: the renderer’s job is not “to produce ‘the finished scene,’ in one swell foop.” Its job is to produce a usable, isolated, part of it. A “single track.” To tell you, for example, “where the light is, where the shadow is.” (Most of the 3D illusion is produced by shadow, not light, and shadows are also where most render-time is consumed. But there are many cheap ways to fake a shadow. The shadows that actually matter, anyway.)
The render gives you components of the overall scene … the “individual, isolated music tracks” that are then “mixed-down” to produce the finished recording.
In a music studio, the drummer comes in and bangs away on his drum-kit in an isolated room, working to a click track. Then, maybe on another day, the guitarist comes into her “isolated room” and lays down the lead-guitar while listening to the drums in her “pots.” Eventually you might have thirty, fifty or more tracks. That’s why audio mixing-boards are so damned wide. 
But it works. The artistry happens in the console, in the “final mix-down.” Same thing goes for CG. Same reasons. You routinely hear short and long versions of a song, country mixes, dance mixes, hip-hop. All from the same so-called “stem tracks.”
If you look at any movie’s “how we did it” videos, you see a shot breakdown. So, what you do, when first regarding (in your mind’s eye …) the scene you want to build, is to “do a mental shot-breakdown” on it. Then, start by doing OpenGL Preview renders to initially produce all those layers, one by one. “Mix them down … now … first.” Some of those “previews” might well be good enough to be final. The rest will need to be fed through a renderer … of which you have two built-in ones and access to many other external ones. In this way, you “sneak up on” the shot that you eventually produce, actually doing most of the image-making in the compositor.
And, by the way, do the selfsame thing for the show. OpenGL Preview renders are fast enough to be cheap, and cheap enough to be fast. Put those, carefully labeled, into the video editor and use that to “cut the show” before you render anything. This will tell you what you actually need to render, and what you actually need to model, and to what level-of-detail. Instead of lovingly rendering something, only to have it wind up on the cutting-room floor, fill the cutting room with cheap paper dolls until you have determined exactly(!) what made the cut. (And exactly what you can “get away with” in each shot.)
If you’ve got to hit a deadline, and make money doing it, this is how.
If you start to render a frame from an individual scene, you should see a gray bar in the upper-left corner of the screen telling the frame number, time elapsed, etc. Right after the “Time” variable there should be another variable, “remaining.” This variable gives you an estimate of how long it will take to finish rendering that frame, and you can combine that with the total time to get a full estimate.
If you want exact results, In the render panel there should be a dropdown "metadata." Under that dropdown, there should be a checkbox labeled "stamp output," enable this and make sure "RenderTime" is checked. This will leave a black box (also in the upper-left corner) in the produced image with the render time of that frame. It will be a part of the actual image, so you won't lose it when you close Blender as long as you save the image externally.
Note: be sure to turn Stamp Output off for your final render!