Are unbiased render engines able to bake lightmaps ?

Support Lighting and Rendering
1

Hello,

I have noticed the software I know being able to bake lightmaps (for e.g Beast) are not pathtracers but biased renderers.

But would it be possible to bake lightmaps with a pathtracer such as Cycle ?
It’d be nice to have the equivalent of the baking feature of the internal Blender renderer for Cycle. I’d much more realistic. I’ve spend hours trying to have realistic results by using radiosity and by adding lights to fake color bleeding but I never get good results.

Of course this would only work for diffuse surface but is it at least possible ? Or are pathtracers not suited to generate lightmaps ?

If there’s no clean solution, maybe we could write a script that isolates each face (and hide the other faces and objects), makes a render of this face with a camera oriented thanks to its normal, and generate the lightmap by repeating this process for each face.

2

Thanks for the link :). It’s a shame the development was stopped without opening the sources. I’d have liked to seen how lightmap could be generated from an unbiased renderer. Has anyone a clue how the “lightmap mode” of Parthenon is achieved ?