Quick answer: Unreal Niagara baking loops taking hours on a system with many emitters? Bake runs serially per emitter; parallelize or split system.
Boss VFX bake: 4 hours. Each emitter takes 5 minutes; serial; 50 emitters = 4 hours.
Split system
Multiple smaller systems. Each bakes faster; can be parallelized.
Or run bake in CI parallel
CI runs N bakes in parallel; combines outputs. Wall time drops.
Audit bake settings
Some emitters don't need bake; toggle off. Reduces total work.
“Bake is per-emitter serial by default. Parallelism is at the system level.”
If your VFX bakes take hours, the architecture is the bottleneck. Split; parallelize; restructure.