The Lightmapper v0.3

This is an exciting addon.Thanks for all your work, Naxela. I have more or less got it working now, so have written down my steps in case it helps anybody else. Please tell me what I’ve got wrong and I’ll update it.

  1. Install Lightmapper addon

  2. In the Lightmapper addon drop-down, click Install CV. Then restart Blender.

  3. For your object(s) that you want to bake, go to Object Properties / The Lightmapper and Enable Lightmapping.
    a. Choose your resolution
    b. Choose your Unwrap Mode. I think this is the mode you used to unwrap your mesh in the first place. Not sure what ‘Copy Existing’ does - maybe reuse existing UV, without unwrapping again?

  4. Under Render Properties go to The Lightmapper and click on Build Lightmaps. It will then bake your mesh(es), creating new image files as necessary based on the Object name (it appends ‘_baked’ and ‘_denoised’).

    a. If you’ve enabled Alert on Finish and leave your volume turned up, it’ll scare the pants off you when it’s finished!
    b. Clean Lightmaps will delete existing baked image files. Though when you re-bake these will be overwritten anyway, so it is not usually necessary to clean them.
    c. Quality is set here, not with Render Samples. Choose Medium, High etc.

The main thing I’m not sure about is how/when the unwrapping works. TL doesn’t recognise that I have xatlas installed (it works from the Toolbox) so perhaps TL just uses existing UV if that is the case. TL can’t be unwrapping each time I run it, as it is too quick.

I have been working on a Revit-Blender-Cleanup-Bake workflow, via scripts, but have struggled with how to incorporate denoising in order to avoid excessive bake times. TL looks like it could be the solution I have been looking for, so I’m really pleased to see it. Now I just have to work out how to control/call it via Python.

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