Mastering Unity 2017 Game Development with C# - Second Edition

Baked lighting

Baked lighting is the optimal lighting method, but it can only be used under specific circumstances. With baked lighting, all lighting data (highlights, shadows, and so on) are precalculated and saved to a texture (lightmap). The lightmap is then applied to scene geometry using a second UV channel (Lightmap UVs) on top of their standard materials, using multiplicative blending. This makes geometry appear illuminated by scene lights. This approach is ideal for achieving high levels of realism while maintaining excellent runtime performance, because it saves Unity from having to calculate lighting at runtime. However, lightmapping only works properly for static objects (objects that never move), such as walls, floors, ceilings, ...