Light Baking
Light baking is a computer graphics technique used in real-time rendering to precompute and store complex lighting information, such as shadows, reflections, and global illumination, into textures or data structures. This process is performed offline to reduce the computational load during runtime, enabling high-quality lighting effects in games and interactive applications without sacrificing performance. It is commonly used in game engines like Unity and Unreal Engine to create realistic environments with static or semi-static lighting.
Developers should learn and use light baking when creating real-time 3D applications, such as video games or architectural visualizations, where performance is critical but high-fidelity lighting is desired. It is particularly useful for static or slowly changing scenes, as it allows for complex effects like soft shadows and ambient occlusion to be rendered efficiently at runtime. By precomputing lighting, developers can achieve visual quality comparable to offline rendering while maintaining smooth frame rates on target hardware.