The Lightmapper
Description
The Lightmapper is an addon for Blender that implements lightmapping and denoising capabilities for global illumination texture baking with support for 32-bit HDR Lightmaps. Baking is done through Cycles.
Development information thread here: http://forums.armory3d.org/t/hdr-lightmaps-addon/3074/6
It's free and open-source.
Features :
- Cycles-based automated lightmap baking
- Per-object settings and individual resolution setting
- Denoising with Intel OIDN (Bundled)
-
Automatic CPU/GPU option and switching
-
Scalable lightmapping quality and resolution
-
OpenCV Based filtering options for post-processing
-
Automatic Installation for OpenCV
-
Direct 32-bit RGBE (.hdr) export for Armory/EEVEE/Unity
-
RGBM/RGBD png encoding for non-compatible engines (Godot/UE4/Etc.)
-
Automatic node-management (Setup, backup, restoration)
Upcoming/Todo features:
- More stability
- More documentation
- New denoising option - NVIDIA Optix
- Automated AO baking and node management
- New filtering options
- Equirectangular panoramic rendering with EEVEE
- Cubemap panoramic rendering with EEVEE
- Spherical Coefficient gathering
- Additional bake-time Object/Light/World controls
- Lightmap Adjustment Tools
- Addon refactoring
- Network Rendering
- Texel Density management
- UV/Lightmap Preparation tools
- and more....
Installation
Installation of the addon is straight forward. Get the latest release here, and select the zip-package:
https://github.com/Naxela/HDR_Lightmapper/releases
Note! - Releases are recommended, git versions are most likely unstable
Usage
The addon consists of 2 panel for now:
The main panel located under the Render context tab controls quality and general settings for the baking process, including denoising, filtering, lightmap-location and more:
The second panel is located under the object tab, and controls the individual baking resolution as well as specific unwrap settings for the object:
The easiest way to get started is:
- Make a scene with a cube, a plane and a light
- Select the cube and the plane
- Click "Build Light for selected" in the main HDR Lightmapper panel
- Baking should take a few seconds
- Turn on Eevee with World Light for better and quick visual review:
Videos:
Blender, Lightmapping and Armory
Armory HTML5 examples using Baked GI w. HDR Lightmaps:
Naxela's Laboratory (No quality scaling, requires decent specs):
Experiment 1: http://laboratory.naxela.info/experiment_1/
Experiment 2: http://laboratory.naxela.info/experiment_2/
Experiment 3: http://laboratory.naxela.info/experiment_3/