@tea_monster
This is a good question.
Some blender gurus may answer it.
You possibly mean to flip normal maps xyz from cycles to BI.
Because in cycles, on the normal node, we can select compatibility to BI.
Cycles baking also has a xyz to select accordingly. BI has nothing. (and GLSL)
These are the cases make me thing like "get ride of BI as soon as possible).
We still need BI, that’s all.
I was discussing this with Doris a while back too…now with all this baking it will become a lot easier.
Not now, bad timing.
Cycles baking should become stable first.
Yeah, I have come to realise that over the last evening. Too many issues right now.
As an aside - is there much point in baking normal maps for still image renders? All the time that it will take me to make normal maps for my objects is probably not that much different from the difference in render time (that probably says more about my speed of making normal maps than anything else!).
For static objects, like a museum scene, where camera is the only animated object,
COMBINE is the only texture we need to bake.
However, cycles bake became unstable after implemented to baster.
The cycles/bake branch (with the external save option) is stable.
Let’s wait a little more.
matt, as i understand (and please correct me if the following is wrong), for a single sculpt baking is not necessary and too much of a hassle actually, as long your computer has enough ram to render the highpoly sculpt. but, in a museum scene, we would like to assemble many highpoly sculptures in one view, would we not? and, then, even 32 gig of ram might be too low to render this. here comes in baking, and changing the highpolies to rather lowpolies with the baked textures, normals, etc and the scene can be rendered in good time on any computer ,
Hopefully not too long and we can start baking things 
How we would organise the museum would be another matter. There probably needs to be a custodian for the project to prevent the usual back and forth of disagreeing ideas that often happens on the internet, but everything could be brainstormed and voted on if that was a sensible way to do it.
Thanks, that makes sense. I think I had become a little confused as to the importance of baking since it was being talked about quite a bit in a non-animation setting.
@Doris
a real time animation render maintaining cycles quality is possible now.
It’s not about RAM, we are talking about interactive rendered scenes.
we are talking about interactive rendered scenes
@michalis … help me understand something. Right now I’m working on a very elaborate animation project, consisting of hundreds of objects ( maybe upwords of 1000 if you count instances). Currently I just brute-force render high poly backplates ( which take about 4-6 hours to render clean of noise.) The amount of ram far exceedes my ability to render with my GPU. I then animate characters / objects seperately and then composite the animations over these backplates. The downside of this of course is it prevents you from having a camera moving throughout the scene, it has to be stationary.
In order to bake high poly to low poly, I would have to do this on a per object basis correct? Or is it somehow possible to bake the entire scene? Sorry for my lack of understanding, but as an animator, I am really interested in learning more about this.
To bake the entire scene at once? Not possible, not yet.
It’s on the to do list, I think.
Animated figures are different. You can’t bake shadow casting. Obviously.
You may bake a clever color breading though. AO maps of course. Normal maps (tangent)
It’s tricky. However, you might be able to render in BI, in the end. With some cycles quality.
Or in cycles (direct light - bounces=0)