This page is unfinished, but made accessible because there may be useful content or links in the Notes section.

Final lightmapped objects in Blender. Two lightmaps used.

• Summary
• Create objects for baking
  • Notes
• UV Unwrapping
• Create empty material
• Change to Shadeless Shading Mode
• Bake Ambient Occlusion
• Bake final texture
• Notes

Summary

Here’s a quick rundown of how to do it.

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Create objects for baking

• In Object Mode, choose Add > Mesh > Cube (if not here already).
• Add a Plane and a Point Lamp too.
• Select Plane with right-click, press S and move the mouse to scale a bit larger.

Notes

• Right-click selects things.
• Spacebar lets you search for things.
• Hold control when dragging XYZ handles to move on a grid.
• Move toolbars to the top by right-clicking and selecting Flip to Top.

UV Unwrapping

• Open the UV/Image Editor window
  • Click-drag the arrow in the top-right to duplicate the window
  • Select the cube icon in the top-left corner and choose UV/Image Editor
• Select the cube (Right-click in Object Mode)
• Switch to Edit Mode (Tab)
• Select all faces (A)
• In the left toolbar, choose Shading/UV’s tab (Blender 2.75+), select Unwrap > Smart UV Project
  • Island Margin: 0.03
  • OK

Create empty material

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Change to Shadeless Shading Mode

If you don’t adjust your shading mode, you won’t be able to see the correct lighting.

• Change shading mode to Texture
  • It’s the white circle next to “Object Mode” button.
• Change 3D view shading to Multitexture Shadeless
  • Small “+” button in top-right of 3D view.
  • Shading section > Multitexture, and check Shadeless.

Bake Ambient Occlusion

This stage is optional, but AO gives your objects some nice shading where their edges meet.

• Select the Cube’s faces.
  • Select it and change to edit mode, then press A.
• Create a new image called Cube_AO.
  • In the UV window, choose Image > New Image.
• Apply it to the Cube.
  • With the cube’s faces selected, choose the image from the UV window’s drop-down menu.

Now we need to bake the AO onto this image.

Bake final texture

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Notes

• It’s important to have the correct object selected when doing things. Blender is context/selection sensitive.
  • To apply an image to faces, you must have the faces selected in Edit mode.
  • When baking, you must have the object selected in Object mode.
• Doesn’t work for tiled textures where the mesh’s UV’s overlap the regular bounds.
  • Tiled texturing works by scaling the UV’s to be many times larger than the image. This means they cannot be baked easily.
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jJGBzAxXKo - Modeling and Texturing a Building in Blender
• This is not how Unity and most other games do lightmapping.
  • This technique is merging the lighting and diffuse textures into one single diffuse. Unity actually layers the lightmap on top, without merging. This means the lightmap can be a different resolution from the main textures.