New light baking architecture “LightBaker v1.0”
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New light baking architecture “LightBaker v1.0”
Baked Global Illumination now uses our new LightBaker v1.0 architecture for on-demand bakes. The New Light Baking Architecture impacts the production of most artifacts related to baked lighting: lightmaps, light probes, shadowmasks, ambient occlusion textures, etc. In the new architecture, code is internally split into modules with clear responsibilities and well-defined inputs and outputs.
This redesign has significantly simplified our code base. Simpler code makes it easier and faster to fix bugs and it lowers the risk of introducing new ones.
Note that Auto mode still uses the existing progressive baking feature.
For creators working with Baked Global Illumination, Unity’s new light-baking architecture will mean few changes. We have built this new architecture with Editor responsiveness and baking speed in mind. When using on-demand baking, Unity now takes a “snapshot” of the Scene state when the Generate button is clicked. This snapshot is then sent to the bake process and the bake will continue uninterrupted, unless the Cancel button is clicked. Unity no longer checks the Scene state every frame, which previously undermined Editor performance.
Unity also now provides a Baking Profile (see image). This can be found in the Lighting window when using the GPU backend in on-demand mode, and offers users a tradeoff between performance and GPU memory usage.