Light Baking Options

Light Baking

Light baking refers to the process of creating texture maps based on the lighting in your scene. These are called lightmaps, 

Light baking is only available when using Ultra Render. The lightmaps are created based on Ultra Reder’s highly realistic path traced lighting. 

Once generated, lightmaps can be applied to your objects just like any material or texture map. The lightmaps will project the effects of lighting, such as shadows or colour changes, directly onto the surface of the object. 

This effectively allows you to fake the look of lighting in your scene. This is handy when you want to reduce the number of lights in your scene to speed up performance, or when you want to achieve more realistic looking surface finishes in your real-time scene. 

Baking options

These settings only apply when baking lightmaps, and will not effect the appearance of your ultra render scene. 

Lightmap Resolution

Set the size of your lightmap here. 

Samples per frame

Similar to rays per frame, this sets the amount of light samples the engine processes simultaneously while baking. Increasing this will speed up the baking process, or the quality of the maps achieved in the same amount of time, but requires more memory. Not recommended unless your computer has a high GPU. 

Baking Denoise 

Baking denoise can be turned on to produce a smoother looking lightmap in less time.  

Sigma and k Sigma are different filters used to create the denoise effect. The default settings should be sufficient for most projects. 

Turn denoise off or adjust filters if unwanted blurring appears when baking.