Baking Lighting Data Into Your Unity Scene

Often when working on Unity projects, you will want to use “baked” lighting, for any number of reasons. This is how.

Baked Lighting:

“Baked” Lighting, as opposed to “Realtime” Lighting, is a lighting method in which the shadows, Ambient Occlusion, and other lighting details of “Static” (non-moving) shadow-casting objects are “baked”, or combined with, the rendered textures of other objects in the scene.

When using Baked Lights, remember to bake the lighting data regularly, to update scene changes.

How to bake lighting:

The process is very simple.

1.

Ensure you have at least one source of baked light in the scene. This could be an actual light set to “Baked” mode, or it could be an emissive material which emits light.

2.

Make sure all the non-moving objects that you want to be affected by baked light are set to “Static/Contribute GI”. If this isn’t enabled, no baked lighting will affect the object, unless using Light Probes which I will discuss more later.

3.

Open the Lighting window by going to “Window/Rendering/Lighting”.

4.

Set the Lightmapper option to “Progressive GPU (Preview)” (or whatever GPU option is available on future versions), then click “Generate Lighting” on the Lighting window to start the baking process.

After the baking process completes…

you should notice that a new folder has been created for you at the location your scene is saved:

--

--

Unity game developer / C# Programmer / Gamer. Australian (Tasmanian) indie games developer for 10+ years. Currently looking for games industry employment.

Get the Medium app

A button that says 'Download on the App Store', and if clicked it will lead you to the iOS App store
A button that says 'Get it on, Google Play', and if clicked it will lead you to the Google Play store
Vincent Taylor

Unity game developer / C# Programmer / Gamer. Australian (Tasmanian) indie games developer for 10+ years. Currently looking for games industry employment.