Unity 2018 Shaders and Effects Cookbook - Third Edition

How it works...

The most complicated part of rendering is the light transport. During this phase, the GPU calculates how the rays of light bounce between objects. If an object and its lights don't move, this calculation can be done only once as it will never change during the game. Flagging an object as Static is how to tell Unity that such an optimization can be made.

Loosely speaking, light baking refers to the process of calculating the global illumination of a static object and saving it in what is called a lightmap. Once baking is completed, lightmaps can be seen in the Global Maps tab of the Lighting window:

Light baking comes at a great ...