Baking/Lightmaps - when does it make sense

[BeneZ]

Hello,

for sure another beginnr question, I'm still collecting a lot informations.

All your official tutorials show, how to bake lightmaps.
But some other (not vray related), say that baking of lightmaps is not necessary and even a waste of time. They work only dynamic.

When I watch in a tutorial, that the final baking of a room takes 14 hours rendertime, I think that's not a real timesaver

I understand, that baking makes only sense, when you want to create VR or Game-stuff. Is that right?
Or maybe if you plan to make a long movie take later in that setup.

Or did I miss something?

Thanks

[Alexander.Atanasov]

Hi Benez,

I understand, that baking makes only sense, when you want to create VR or Game-stuff. Is that right?

Yes, light baking is essentially used when you want to have good quality lighting at a high frame rate. Light baking and light maps are intended to greatly reduce calculations and resources because the GI and shadows have been baked into a texture(lightmap). You can then make a VR experiences, games/applications, sequence animations with the Unreal sequencer and that will be really fast because it is much faster to load a lightmap texture than to do all the GI and shadow calculations at a high frame rate to be close to "real time".
The cons of using Light baking and light maps are:

• you need to have good UVs for the lightmaps (you can check here for our quick start:Preparing a Project for Light Baking);
• you have to do a light bake after every change that you make in the scene to have correct and proper GI and shadows;
• Light baking can take a lot of time depending on scene complexity.

You have to decide for yourself if Light baking will be beneficial to your projects depending on their scale, complexity and available resources


Best regards,
Alexander

[BeneZ]

I just would recommend you, to point on that in your tutorials, too
I was on the edge on dismissing using Vray for UE after watching the "you need 14 hours to bake" tutorial, but when I tried then myself, I found out, that I don't need.
(I know it of course now)