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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 fak...

If you put a light in a scene, it works, so why do we need to bother with baking? There's two reasons. First, each realtime light needs to draw everything it touches again. It means lights are really expensive to render, compared to a lightmap which is just s...

This section covers exactly what the cost of each type of light is. As we're measuring cost, our currency is draw call passes. A draw call is Unity sending data to the graphics card to render. We won't consider the cost of actually shading pixels in this sect...

Realtime lights also have an Importance setting. Unity will only render (in VRC) 8 lights as full extra pass lights, which places an upper limit on the number of times an individual object can be affected by lights and re-rendered. Which lights it chooses is ...

Just as a model might have a basic albedo/diffuse map, a normal map, and etc., a light map is a texture applied to the surface of that model. Using Bakery or whatever, we pre-calculate the lighting using higher quality lighting calculations than we can afford ...

Creating UV maps for objects is tough. And doing it again for lightmaps is even more work. But it makes a big difference to visual quality. Unity's automatic lightmap UV generation doesn't work too well with complex objects, and for simple ones, it can still p...

Lightmaps cover the environment, but if you just bake a lightmap, dynamic objects won't be affected. You also need light probes! Light probes are points in space that capture an image of the surrounding lighting from all directions. When there are enough prob...

This section covers information on light probe placement tools. LightProbesVolumes (free) Light Probes Volumes is a free tool that places probes down based on the scene collision. It's easy to use and quick to set up. Simply place down volumes and have it fi...

(Unfortunately, this is really more a *cynicist's* guide.) This section will go over using the in-built Unity bakers. Unity provides three options for lightmap baking. Enlighten is tried, true, terribly outdated, and depreciated in newer Unity versions. The...

If you open the Bakery window, it'll change your lighting settings so that Unity won't try to automatically overwrite the lightmaps it bakes. Because Bakery is seperate from Unity's lighting system, you'll need to take note of the following: Don't use the "Ge...

Mixed Lighting Mixed lighting incurs the same costs as realtime lighting for dynamic objects. Because the first directional light is free, you can combine high quality baked lighting with real-time shadows using Shadowmask mode. Combine a Unity directional li...

To really understand how post processing works, we have to take a detour. This is a camera. A traditional camera works by using a lens to focus an image into a sheet of chemically treated film. The film, being exposed to the light, undergoes a chemical rea...

Okay, now you have it installed, let's go over the basics of using post-processing. First, we need to cover post-processing volumes and how they work. Note: 1's VRWorld Toolkit can set up post-processing for you! I recommend using it to install it and set it ...

First off, you'll need the latest release of the Post Processing Stack VRchat supports. Note: Post Processing Stack v2 is free. It does not cost money, and it is not on the Unity Asset Store. Do not buy post-processing systems off the Asset Store, they will n...

This follows on from the previous page where we set up a global post-process volume Next, let's cover adding a custom effect that only affects a small specific zone in the scene - a post-process volume. Create a new GameObject in your scene and add a collid...

There are some best practices to be aware of when adding post processing to your scene. First, you should always have a base global post processing volume set up to have some basic tonemapping and bloom parameters. Then use seperate global or local volumes fo...

When using post-processing, there are some useful rules of thumb to keep in mind about designing your scene. In real life, things are normally pretty bright before they glow... unless you're using a foggy lens. So don't set your glowing light emissive object ...

The Standard shader is one of the many misunderstood parts of Unity in VRchat. It provides a fairly realistic look thanks to it's physically based approach, but with some huge pitfalls that anyone who can't tell their "smoothness" and "metalness" apart will fa...

First, we have the albedo map. The albedo map is uninteresting, but very important. It's where the colours of your material come from! What you'd put here is the same kind of texture that other engines would call a colour or diffuse map. To go into extra detai...

Next, we have the normal map. The normal map defines details on the surface of the material seperate to those of the mesh.  If you're reading this guide, you might not know what a normal is. Let me explain it for you! You see, meshes are made up of vertices, ...