Every year, more and more games are being released with real-time rendering solutions that allow for more realistic-looking environments at the price of ever-growing computing power of modern PCs and consoles. However, due to the limiting hardware capabilities of mobile platforms, it is still a long time before we are ready to part ways with cheap and affordable techniques such as lightmapping.

Lightmapping is a technology for precomputing brightness of surfaces, also known as baking, and storing it in a separate texture—a lightmap. In order to see lighting in the area, we need to be able to calculate it at least 30 times per second (or more, based on fps requirements). This is not very cheap; however, with lightmapping we can calculate lighting once and then apply it as a texture. This technology is suitable for static objects that artists know will never be moved; in a nutshell, this process involves creating a scene, setting up the lighting rig and clicking Bake to get great...