What is Bakery and why use it

Bakery is a high-end, production-ready GPU lightmapper, designed with flexibility and performance in mind. On top of light baking itself, Bakery aims to solve following problems:

• Fixing various baking artifacts, such as seams, light/shadow leaks, incorrect shadow terminators, etc. Baking a lightmap should not bring more problems than rendering a camera frame in an offline renderer.
• Baking all kinds of useful ligthing data. Direct and indirect contribution of different light sources in any combination, separate shadow masks, direction vectors, spherical harmonics, etc. Lighting can be also baked per-vertex instead of using textures.
• Physical correctness. Bakery results were thoroughly compared against Mitsuba, a well-known unbiased renderer.
• LOD support.

Bakery can also take advantage of RTX hardware to speed up baking.

When used in Unity, following benefits are added:

• Directional information can be baked in the form of dominant direction map (classic “directional” mode in Unity), 3 maps for Radiosity Normal Mapping, or 4 maps for per-pixel Spherical Harmonics (much higher quality than classic directional). Multiple directional modes can be used in a single scene on different objects.
• Bakery supports both correct inverse-squared light falloff and Unity's own non-physical one.
• IES light support.
• Baked prefab support.