Lightmap Baking: Diffuse - Krunklehorn/io-scene-gzrs2 GitHub Wiki
Lightmap baking is a very delicate process. Blender is very picky about things such as the active selection, active UV layer, active image node, and so on. Furthermore, if the lightmap is enabled during the bake process, it will influence the result in a feedback loop. You don't want this!
Luckily, the plugin has an operation to help you prepare for each bake. Let's setup our lightmap as follows...
- In the Image Editor, create a new image with no alpha channel.
- Give it square, power-of-two dimensions. 1024x1024 is fine.
- Navigate to World->Realspace and assign the new image to the "Lightmap" field.
- Run both "Recalculate Lights & Fog" and "Prepare for Bake" operations.
- If you make changes to the scene, always come back to recalculate and prepare before you start baking again.
- Navigate to Render->Bake and make sure your bake mesh is selected. Hit that Bake button and wait.
- On a good GPU, a 1024x1024 bake at 16 samples should finish within a few seconds.
- If this simple bake is super slow, search the internet about enabling "GPU Compute" to verify your graphics card is being utilized.
- Once finished, navigate to the world tab and toggle "Lightmap Mix" to check the result.
- If everything looks super bright, first try toggling "Lightmap Mod4" before tweaking any lights. Keep it on the darker setting.
- Keep sample count low for now. We denoise manually and you can always rebake with more samples later.
- For a final bake, anything above 1024 samples is probably overkill.
- In the Image Editor, navigate to Image->Save As and save your image to the same directory as your .blend project. Use the following settings...
- File Format: PNG
- Color: RGB
- Color Depth: 16
- Color Space sRGB
This is NOT your lightmap yet, only the image data.