Egret Studios LLC
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.
Patch Update* - 10th April 2026
What's New?
This update addresses UV generation, custom UV support, and ambient occlusion quality based on feedback.
- UV Generation Reworked Baker now uses Smart UV Project for automatic lightmap UV generation, eliminating the overlapping islands caused by the previous box projection method. Results are significantly cleaner and production-ready out of the box.
- Custom UV Map Support You can now disable automatic UV generation entirely and bake directly into any existing UV map on your objects. A dropdown in the UV Atlasing panel lists all available UV maps in your scene, simply select the one you want and Baker will use it.
- Ambient Occlusion Improvements AO baking now correctly configures ray distance before baking begins, producing stronger and more visible results. A new AO Distance slider has been added to the GI panel when AO mode is selected, giving you full control over the effect relative to your scene scale.
Patch Update* - 27th April 2026
What's New?
For Support, Don't hesitate to reach out on my inbox, happy creating :)
