Since blender internal can render GI, and Cycles is a long ways off, what renderers for blender would allow a person to bake GI into a light map? What I’m looking into is the possibility of using another renderer to generate the GI lighting, then baking it into a map that blender internal can render (super fast, I might add) or export to a game engine for use in real time.
Is this even possible?
Thanks!
I have been trying to figure out the same thing since long but didnt find much success. 
there seems a way to mask out objects in luxrender and then use an orthographic camera to get only shadows, caustics & dispersions out but its very unfeasible for many lights & gi ofc. I too would love to know answer to this.
Vray, Lightwave and turtle all spring to mind…all are commercial and only vray has a blender integration…not sure if that extends to the baking though.
Lightwave is easy to export to.
Turtle has made a name for itself for baking maps for videogames and is superquick and quality for this…
I don’t know about any open source alternatives though.
aqsis, pixie, 3delight, being free alternatives, though the initial setup of the baking process is a bit more complicated
O.o that is amazingly complicated. I Guess I would have to wait till blender gets a bake with cycles feature.
actualy it sounds complicated but in practise you only need to set up that shader once (just copy/paste it) and then reuse it everytime.
That’s what I’ve meant by “initial” setup is more complicated.
But you’re right. If you’re not familiar with renderman and/or prorgramming in general it’s too hard to grasp and/or see an easy workflow in using this technique.
If I am not mistaken I think that UDK can bake lightmaps with more than decent GI, though you might get a bit of “Unreal” style baked into your maps.
AFAIK, If you use automatic lightmap UV generation in UDK, then you really can’t use UDK lightmaps in any other software than UDK. If you make your own lightmap UV’s in blender, then you can export lightmaps from UDK to where ever you want. But those are not just normal lightmaps, they are RNM maps, which can’t be used in any other engine if that engine does not know how to use RNM.
If I am wrong, please some one correct me.
If you have Dx11 graphics card then you can usefree MachStudio to bake GI.
And of course there is always giles