What's Bakery?

Bakery is a tool for baking lights with Unity. However, it only works on NVIDIA GPUs. For VRchat, it's really useful because it's

• high quality, using raytracing and AI denoising
• supports physically accurate lighting, but also options for stylisation like fake ambient occlusion
• really fast, much much faster than Unity's light baking
• can bake different types of lightmaps that look better than Unity's default
• can pack lightmaps tighter than Unity using xatlas
• real-time preview addon (purchased seperately) lets you test your lighting before baking it, inspect issues normally invisible even using the builtin tools

What's the catch? It costs $55. The Real-Time Preview addon is an extra $35. So, I can only really recommend it if your time is valuable. (Note that Bakery periodically goes on sale.) Also, you do need some knowledge of the regular Unity lightmap baking workflow even when using it.

Some parts of this guide will still apply to the built-in Unity lightmap rendering, but no guarantees. There are lots of guides to baking lightmaps with Enlighten on the internet, and lots of guides to general lighting theory - I'd recommend looking for some even if you primarily plan on using Bakery, because it's still Unity. I'll add some resources at the end of this guide.