Why should I use Baked lighting if I can use Realtime lighting?

The following is baked lighting:

The following is realtime lighting:

Realtime light rays do not bounce on surfaces. Not only it looks worse, it is also slower to render in-game.

Bake lights to make your world look nice and save frames.

Bakery or GPU Progressive?

Bakery is often recommended for world creation (A NVIDIA GPU is required for this). However, since Unity 2019, GPU Progressive is a viable alternative to Bakery, and also works with AMD GPUs. Consider trying it and see if it fits you.

Bakery documentation: https://geom.io/bakery/wiki/index.php?title=Manual Bakery in Unity Asset store: https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/level-design/bakery-gpu-lightmapper-122218

The basics of lightmapping

For a basic bake, a world needs the following:

• Any object that needs to have light baked needs to have Contribute GI in the GameObject settings. Pretty much walls, floors, and every object that does not move and does not disappear. Also check Reflection Probe Static so that they show up when baking Reflection Probes.

• Meshes that need to have light baked need to have Generate Lightmap UVs enabled in the mesh asset settings.

• Light sources settings should be Baked.

  

  • When using Bakery, these light sources are ignored and Bakery-specific components must be used instead.

• Properly place light probes in the scene. Light probes are used for dynamic geometry such as Avatars and Pickups to be properly lit. Don't put them inside walls. The following is a picture with light probes that were placed automatically. When beginning, you don't need to do this; get a good bake first on a small scene by placing light probe groups roughly where you feel it. Afterwards you can figure out how to add more easily.

• Properly place Reflection probes in the scene. Reflection probes are used by many materials for subtle reflections or obvious glass and metal reflections, including on avatars.