Light Baking

Hi Aerin, if you have searched youtube and found that things are not applicable because they are not similar to your project I think the following will just muddy the water a bit.

Light baking, like modeling and animation is part technique and part art. The underlying process for baking is the same regardless. Where things get different are the decisions needed to make baked lighting maps optimized for your particular verge3d scene. I would recommend searching for creating Atlas Maps on youtube.

Lets start with 100 objects. The count is not that important, especially if all 100 objects use the same map. But I am guessing that is not your case. So let’s assume your scene is a room with walls, ceiling and floor and a bunch of stuff inside.

Now for the tricky part. You lighting maps are going to be based on what objects will receive animated shadows and those will not.

Objects that require active shadows…you will want to exclude them from your atlas map. For all the other objects that will just receive static shadows. You then have to decide which objects in your room need the highest level of detail. As an example, books, magazine covers, things with text that you want legible will require their own map and you will have to optimize the size so that those items are of sufficient resolution.

Once you have your items grouped you can then begin baking the maps. There are a few approaches. You can combine all textures, AO, light, etc into one map. Or you can break it out so that you have individual maps for various inputs to your BSDF.

There are plugins that make baking textures easier but I have found that doing them by hand is the best way.

I would recommend watching: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MH7Xdol5erw

You can also check out the add on SimpleBake.

But it will be up to you to determine what tools you want to use and then how to use it efficiently.

Good luck.

I don’t have any experience with that plug-in but creating your maps manually allows you to set the resolution per map as needed. The atlas map sizes can be much larger 4K, 8k etc. to get the quality you need. It’s a balancing act of performance vs quality.