Yep, the joy of environment/level design!. That's largely why Unity, UE, Godot etc. game development suites have their own 'bake' and 'lightmap' solutions to cater to that very scenario.
You can join alot of object into multiple sections, example, furniture, walls, etc. And sometimes you just have to be patient. Thats the beauty of it ☝️👉
Thankss for the explanation! Is hard to find good stuff about light map. There is an addon that makes the life easier while baking maps in blender, is called SimpleBaking, i think,( i just discovered it while searching for light maps) you can bake all maps at once and it auto save the maps.
Definitely cumbersome but appreciate the tutorial! I wish Blender let you change the settings of selected objects at once, seems unintuitive, accidentally add Lightmap UV etc to only the final object. Makes me appreciate GPU Lightmass in UE haha
Yup, historically Blender hasn't really had a great track-record with Baking compared to other apps but it's sufficient for most purposes (big con is not anti-aliasing borders and edges fully).
Really appreciate you taking the time to share this. However, the workflow seems incredibly tedious and prone to mistakes if you forget something. Surely there has to be a more efficient way to do this? Wondered if you found a better way in the intervening time, maybe via an add-on?
There are addons but their usefulness largely depends on what the assets are for; if for a game it's worth seeing if the engine editing tools provide functionality to bake texture maps as that will typically be a better option for that specific outcome.
Thank you so much for making this tutorial, I searched a lot for blender lightmap baking tutorial, because unity's bakeresult is very ugly, I want to make the lightmap in blender. And I finally found your tutorial! And I am curious if it is possible to use these lightmaps in a game engine like unity.
In principle it should be possible to use them in any engine that supports meshes having multiple UV maps, you won't be able to bake and then use lightmaps as a separate group of assets otherwise. Failing that, and this is a little more tricky to manage, it is possible to bake everything, lighting, shadows *and* diffuse etc., to a 'unified' image that will then be usable as would normally be done for 'diffuse'. Might be a little old skool but it's a failsafe, although this then makes use of dynamic effects, normal, specular etc. moot.
Hello, is there a way to bake world lightings? I applied a world lighting (forest.exr) to my project and renders correctly within blender, but when I move it to unity, it does not show the lightings. Is there a way to bake? or maybe unwrap UV for a world lighting?
It actually sounds like you're trying to bake 'ambient light', which isn't really a fully qualified light 'source' so it doesn't illuminate in the same way Point, Sun, Area etc. lights. This means, as Blender can only 'bake' direct and indirect light sources, anything that's not emitting light, or affects surfaces therein, generally won't be included. There should be a setting in Unity to set the 'world' or 'ambient' light value.
Hello. Thanks for sharing. I have noticed a checkbox 'New UV Map' at 12:17 in the dialogue for creating a lightmap. What does it do? Couldn't you just tick that one instead of creating new UV map channels for each object?
thank you for the tutorial. May I ask, what is the difference between this and baking Defuse, Metalic, roughness and Normal maps with the direct and indirect light checked on. As in baking material with lights. Is lights maps something different from that? Im learning blender and basically i am creating a room for a website that only supports pbr textures, so i have to bake the light in. Would this approach above work for that?
In essence they're the same except how each 'type' is used or organised (collated together)... With that in mind if your project uses PBR you likely don't need to bake shadows or shading as that would typically be handled real-time by the render engine (or the engines/editing tools). Just make sure your normal, metallic, roughness etc., are set up per what each material represents and you should be good to go.
@@KatsBits ahh thank you for replying. Yaa that s the problem there is no real time render. And I'm just using 1 combined back texture of 2k. So very Low quality :(
@@floyd1411 based on their docs it looks like you'd need to UV map everything so all objects used their own unique UVs and then bakes everything to similarly unique assigned textures. In other words, you'd set the scene up in Blender as you want it to appear, and then bake, including normal map influence.
@@KatsBits ahh yes. That's why it was coming up all warped. Yaa definitely will unwrap. And yes. Next time i ll bake all 4 textures instead of using just one combined one. Thank you so much for checking. I really appreciate it. Your Tutorials are awesome, definitely gonna keep an eye of for more as and when u post em. Thanks again. Cheers again.
Hiya. Amm this is a bit tricky a question. But is there a way to bake reflections? E.g. Floor has roughness to 0.2 (gloss)and so reflects the walls. Is there a way to bake that?
If you're essentially baking the effect into the diffuse then you're not really baking a functional reflection, all you're doing is baking what that effect is showing, its appearance, at the time of baking, i.e. a static render of the scene relative to the surfaces in it/visible to the effect. To avoid that you have to bake separate image maps and then rely on your engine or renderers material system to (re)build the materials slots with 'reflection' being a separate component therein.
@@KatsBits thank you so much for replying. I may be doing something wrong. I bake the normal, metal and roughness which I connect to the principal bsd. I bake the defuse with direct and indirect, it shows up as image baked proper, but when I connect it to the base shader it gets darker and I'm not sure why that is :( No lights and background set to 0.
@@floyd1411 That's likely a consequence to the Mix *mode* that's being used. This is similar to *Blend Mode* in image editors, just try different ones to see which gives the best result.
@@KatsBits oks will do. Yaa trying to figure it out is the struggle after that it's smooth sailing. Thank you ever so much for being so kind and taking the time to reply. Much appreciated❤
this is used primarily in game engines (like unity, or unreal engine) to optimize game performance, where as performance isn't a focus for blender as its designed to render things that almost exclusively csnt be rendered in real time
Awesome Video! However after converting the UV's to Lightmap pack in edit mode and there is no tearing or texture changes if you switch back to object mode while having your UV lightmap pack active you see the textures playing up is this normal in object mode ?
Not 100% sure about this but the Bake sub-system uses its own renderer, it doesn't use the offline rendering engine (or if it does it's not fully integrated).
@@KatsBits I have confirmed, plus I myself tested, it does support GPU. The baking time reduced as well and in my system settings I can see GPU is being used while baking process. If it is not working, Go to Edit -> Preferences -> System -> CUDA and make sure GPU is enabled (If CPU and CPU both are enabled, then uncheck CPU, only GPU must be enabled)