20. Live and cached: the Cascade cache and the GPU baker

A small stack can run live. When it gets heavy, press Cache All. This is the ship's crane: it packs the results into textures so the viewport has less stuff to calculate.

Your sublayers stay editable. Changes update the affected cache after you stop editing. Re-cache All rebuilds it, Uncache All returns to live nodes.

The GPU baker handles procedural and material bakes, supported custom nodes and object-set UV transfers. Where it cannot run, those steps fall back to Blender's Cycles bake. A layer that cannot be cached stays live, with the reason in the Node Inspector.

Moving the project. Keep .op_image_cache beside the .blend when you move it. If it is missing, OP shows the live result and asks you to restore the folder or press Cache All to rebuild.