Baker — GPU Lightmapper for Blender

Baker transforms Blender’s complex, multi-step lightmap workflow into a single-click pipeline. From UV generation to atlas packing, global illumination baking, AI denoising, and export, Baker automates the entire process — saving hours of manual work. Designed for game developers, 3D artists, and architects, Baker delivers production-ready lightmaps with maximum efficiency.

Key Features:

• Automated UV Atlasing: Generates lightmap UVs using world-space box projection and packs multiple objects into a shared atlas with guillotine bin-packing.

• GPU-Accelerated Baking: Leverages Cycles fully on GPU, with configurable priority (Low / Medium / High) for speed and performance.

• Four Bake Modes: Full Global Illumination, Indirect Only, Ambient Occlusion, and Emissive for flexible lighting workflows.

• AI Denoising: OptiX for NVIDIA GPUs with automatic OIDN fallback for other hardware, ensuring clean, noise-free results.

• Directional Lightmaps: Optional pass encoding dominant light direction for enhanced normal-map shading.

• LOD Support: Automatically propagates UV layouts to LOD siblings for consistent atlasing across multiple detail levels.

• Light Probe Baking: Bakes L1 spherical harmonic irradiance at probe objects and exports data as JSON for dynamic objects.

• Flexible Export: Supports PNG and EXR formats, with configurable output directories and automatic folder creation.

• Non-Destructive Workflow: All material overrides and render settings are fully restored after every bake, even on failure.

• VRAM Estimation: Alerts you if a bake may exceed GPU memory before starting.

• Configurable Quality: Adjust texels-per-unit, max resolution (512–8192), GI bounces (0–16), samples (1–4096), padding, ray bias, and backface culling.

• Blender N-panel UI: Lives in the 3D Viewport sidebar, showing live progress and allowing ESC to cancel at any time.

Baker is the fast, reliable, and professional solution for generating high-quality lightmaps in Blender without the manual hassle, perfect for modern game development pipelines.