(WIP) BakeLight - Editor Vertex and Texture Light Bake Tool

Lightmaps can take up a lot of space, so why not just bake that lighting into the vertices of your mesh? Now you can!

BakeLight bakes Ambient Occlusion, Indirect Lighting, and Direct Lighting(still experimental, but functional).

BakeLight has two parts, VertLight and TexLight. Each parts calculates lighting the in the same way, the difference being that VertLight bakes the lighting information into the vertices of the meshes, and TexLight bakes to a texture.

NOTE: TexLight is still experimental, and is going to be improved over time

Also, this is free! I think this tool is really useful for developers so I am just giving it away!

NEW! Currently adding in Run-Time lightmapping! (one kink to work out yet)

TexLight Images

VertLight Images

 

Looks really nice. Thanks for sharing!

 

Hi! Many thanks for sharing the tool!

Can this tool bake existing lightmaps into vertex colors or does it calculate the lighting information with it's own algorithm? Does "bake" (realtime, baked, mixed) option on the light matters ?

 

Do you mean whether the light setting on each individual light get taken into account? If so, that is something yet to do, but a really simple addition.

Lightmap transferring is a planned feature, definitely in the roadmap

Some other things I am planning:
- ability to bake objects and have them ignore the objects around them (only selfshadow)
- better direct lighting algorithm

 

Forgot to ask. Do you know a terrain splat shader that also works with vertex colors?

 

Not that I know of, but i will add that to the top of the to-do list, since I know that is of big importance for you

 

Updated BakeLight in the OP, some small changes from last night:

- better direct lighting
- more accurate progress bar

Next up:

- terrains!

 

So it seems that terrains don't have anything like vertex colors, so I'm not sure how to go about baking vertex colors for a terrain. The only option then would be to convert the terrain to a mesh and then bake that

 

Added in a mostly working runtime lightmapper that writes lightmaps to unity's builtin lightmap slot, so no extra shader required it also automatically splits into multiple lightmaps if necessary

What this does is it allows you to have a small build size without any lightmaps in the build, and then just generate them at runtime, perhaps this could be a solution for you @AndreiKubyshkin

There is just one kink with assigning the lightmap position data back to the renderer after atlasing the lightmaps, so if anyone has any ideas, please let me know!

 

Does this allow you to blend the baked AO in with predefined Vertex colours?

 

Not currently, although that could be easily done since it has access to the original mesh. Later on today I will add that in as well as including some recent bug fixes such as:
- more predictable indirect lighting
- fixed rotational errors
- some speed and memory leaking fixed during bake process
- improvements to Runtime Lightmapper (seam elimination)

 

any update for these feature?
such like this video

 

@JamesArndt Kind of, I would have to upload the latest version of the tool, but the latest version allows for baking indirect, direct, and ambient occlusion to vertex colors or to textures(although textures are super slow).

I am also somewhere in the process of a runtime lightmapper that will be included as well, because why not right?

 

Hi, great free tool! Do you have any progress on it?

 

Unfortunately not, I have been quite busy with school and freelancing

 

Will give this a try. Been looking for a simple baker that bakes light to diffuse texture