Runtime Lightmapper: Real Time Lightmap Baking with Shadows, AO & Lamps

Runtime Lightmapper bakes real lightmaps while your game runs. Sun shadows, ambient occlusion and lamp light, computed on the player's machine in seconds. No editor bake step, no lighting data in your build.

🔥 TRY IT FIRST! 🔥 Play the demo RIGHT HERE: watch the scene bake in realtime. 🎮 Android | Windows

Player-built bases, generated dungeons and streamed worlds normally can't have baked lighting, since baking happens in the editor. Runtime Lightmapper bakes those levels live, in the game, during runtime. Set it up once, call RequestBake(), and any level is lit the moment it exists.

⚡ FAST AND MOBILE READY

- The bake is sliced across frames under a millisecond budget (3 ms by default), so it never causes a hitch.

- Small scenes finish under a second on Mobile and even faster on Desktop (measured on a mid-range Android phone: scenes bake in 0.2 to 0.8 seconds at Balanced quality)

- A re-bake never flashes: the old lighting stays on screen until the new one is ready, then it swaps.

- Place a lamp and it lights the scene that same frame, the bake then adds its shadows.

- The ray tracing runs on worker threads with Burst on the CPU, the GPU stays free to draw the game.

- The first bake is prepared while your level loads. Change a light and the next bake reuses all that work, so it starts instantly.

💡 WHAT GETS BAKED

- Soft sun shadows with a real penumbra

- Ambient occlusion in every corner

- Point and Spot lamps with soft shadows

- Edge-aware denoising: clean, smooth shadows

🚀 FEWER DRAW CALLS AFTER THE BAKE

Baked lighting is cheaper to draw, too. Once the bake completes, baked objects stop rendering into the shadow map: the Living Room scene in the web demo drops from about 273 draw calls to 172 as the bake fades in. Lighting then costs one texture sample per pixel. GPU instancing stays on.

🎨 STAY IN CONTROL AFTER THE BAKE

Change the sun color, ambient and lamp brightness live, after baking, without a re-bake. Re-color all lamps live with one warm-to-cold dial. The lightmap stores light visibility, not color, so changing colors after baking is free. Flip the before/after switch to show off the difference, and use 15 debug views to see exactly what the baker did.

📦 BUILT FOR SHIPPING

- Runtime-compressed atlas, on mobile too: 8 MB of lightmap becomes 4 MB during the bake, at no measured cost in bake time, checked on each device with a safe fallback

- Atlas Viewer window shows every chart and how well your lightmaps pack

- Same materials work in Built-in, URP and HDRP

- Four quality presets from Performance to Ultra, plus per-object texel density

- Materials render like plain realtime shaders until the bake fades in; a guide covers making your own shader bake-compatible

- Depends only on Unity's own Burst, Collections and Mathematics packages. It compiles in an empty project.

Included: 3 sample scenes, 4 bake presets, 2 ready-made materials, 5 documentation guides with diagrams, full C# and shader source, 414 EditMode tests.

Made for procedural and player-generated levels, base building and roguelikes, level editors and mods: any game that needs baked lighting for a level that did not exist until the player made it.