Light Baking and You
Lighting in Unity is a complicated topic. It's also very slow. It can feel like a ton of trial and error. To remove some of that trial and error, this book summarizes a lot of important information that's good to know about light baking.
This is based on my guide at
https://gitlab.com/s-ilent/SCSS/-/wikis/Other/Light-Baking
Why bake lights?
If you put a light in a scene, it works, so why do we need to bother with baking? There's two rea...
What's Bakery?
Bakery is a tool for baking lights with Unity. However, it only works on NVIDIA GPUs. For VRchat,...
How expensive is unbaked lighting?
This section covers exactly what the cost of each type of light is. As we're measuring cost, our...
Realtime lighting and "Importance"
Realtime lights also have an Importance setting. Unity will only render (in VRC) 8 lights as full...
What's a lightmap?
Just as a model might have a basic albedo/diffuse map, a normal map, and etc., a light map is a t...
How to make lightmap UVs
Creating UV maps for objects is tough. And doing it again for lightmaps is even more work. But it...
What are light probes?
Lightmaps cover the environment, but if you just bake a lightmap, dynamic objects won't be affect...
Tools for automatically placing light probes
This section covers information on light probe placement tools. LightProbesVolumes (free) Light...
A Beginner's Guide To Using The In-Built Unity Lightmappers
(Unfortunately, this is really more a *cynicist's* guide.) This section will go over using the i...
A Beginner's Guide To Using Bakery
If you open the Bakery window, it'll change your lighting settings so that Unity won't try to aut...
Advanced Bakery Notes
Mixed Lighting Mixed lighting incurs the same costs as realtime lighting for dynamic objects. Be...