Bake Lightmap in Blender 

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 ☝️👉

Cheers and yep, probably won't cover any of those because they're not part of default Blender.

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).

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.

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.

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.

It's just a workflow thing really. That can be used but you'll probably have to edit a few things after the fact.

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 If there's no real-time why is it using PDR? What engine is it?

@@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.

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

Kind of yes because Blender doesn't clamp textures the same way a game engine might so they can bleed or tear.

Unity has it's own way of generating and optimizing bakes specifically for that platform, so "yes" ;)

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)

Ah yes, CUDA is for Nvidia based GPUs so isn't enabled by default (not everyone uses Nvidia's obviously).

Uncompressed is basically 'raw' data that's not been adulterated by compression artefacts.

@@KatsBits same for PNG, except it takes less space

@@uis246 you should *always* save 'raw' data where possible. If using PNG make sure compression is *disabled*.

@@KatsBits compression can be lossless. This is how ZIP and PNG work.

@@uis246you're missing the point, save RAW data whenever possible.

Yep, that's baking shadows/lighting for games in a nutshell.

if you have redshift, it's simpler than this but again still a bit confusing.

@@mixtapechi yep, there are a couple of external tools/plugins that can be used but that doesn't necessarily make the process easier!