What is Bakery and why use it

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What

Bakery is a high-end, production-ready GPU lightmapper, designed with flexibility and performance in mind.


Why

Bakery is designed as an alternative to existing lightmappers and focuses on solving 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 lighting data, not just complete lighting or GI only. As of today, you can ask Bakery to generate mixed direct and indirect lighting from all supported light sources and their shadow masks. Lighting can be also baked per-vertex instead of using textures.
  • 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.
  • Physical correctness. Bakery results were thoroughly compared against Mitsuba, a well-known unbiased renderer. Unlike Unity’s built-in solutions, Bakery supports correct inverse-squared lighting attenuation (or if you don’t like it, you can always use Unity-compatible attenuation mode).
  • IES light support.
  • Render Selected (see details)
  • LOD support.
  • Baked prefab support.
  • Baking multiple switchable lightmaps per object is planned.

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