Cycles baking is very dark compared to normal render

Hi,

I have spent a few hours trying to research the issue I am having and although I have read many posts where people are asking the same or similar question, their issue seems to be relating to other factors so I have been unnsuccesful in finding an answer. I would greatly appreciate it if somebody could advise on my issue below.

I am just getting started with Blender (2.8) and am trying to bake the shadows on a white background by setting the material of my object to a Diffuse BSDF (White) and performing a ‘Diffuse Bake’ however the baked texture is considerably darker than what I see in the viewport / regular render.

Am I incorrect to think that a baked texture applied to the object and viewed as an unlit/emissive material should look the same as it does in a conventional render?

  • The blender project settings remain unchanged from default with the exception of the world colour has been changed to white.

  • There are no lights in the scene and for baking purposes window glass has been removed.

  • The baked texture is a 32bit exr file.

The 4 images below show the following:

  • A normal example render (ignore the pink environment!)
  • Rendered Viewport showing a single diffuse material (lighting/brightness as expected)
  • Baked texture applied to object (walls) and viewed in the shaded? viewport
  • The baked texture and world settings

I can see that the shadow/light information is there however everything is very dark!

Any ideas?

Thanks in advance.
Paul.

Update: I have just recreated the scene in 2.79b and a a quick test indicates that it is working as expected. I noticed the default colour management settings are different so will do more testing however this could be a possible bug in 2.8?

For testing I have also switched to my Mac/CPU from a PC/GPU so a few variables to test.

I will post my results just in case it helps somebody else experiencing the same problem.

Comments/suggestions still welcome.