by Egret Studios LLC·Rendering
Images © Egret Studios LLC. Used for product review; image policy.
Baker earns its place in the Superhive library by folding Blender's lightmap steps into one automated pipeline, with recent patches addressing UV generation, custom UV support, AO quality, and multi-object atlas packing.
Baker: GPU Lightmapper condenses Blender's multi-step lightmap workflow into an automated pipeline that runs from UV generation through atlas packing, global illumination baking, AI denoising, and export. It runs Cycles fully on GPU with a configurable priority setting of Low, Medium, or High, and offers four bake modes: Full Global Illumination, Indirect Only, Ambient Occlusion, and Emissive.
Denoising uses OptiX on NVIDIA GPUs with an automatic OIDN fallback on other hardware. Baker also handles directional lightmaps encoding dominant light direction, LOD support that propagates UV layouts to LOD siblings, and light probe baking of L1 spherical harmonic irradiance exported as JSON. A non-destructive workflow restores all material overrides and render settings after every bake, even on failure, and VRAM estimation alerts you before a bake may exceed GPU memory.
The add-on lives in the 3D Viewport sidebar N-panel with live progress and ESC-to-cancel. Quality settings expose texels-per-unit, max resolution, GI bounces, samples, padding, ray bias, and backface culling. Recent updates reworked UV generation to Smart UV Project, added custom UV map support, and fixed multi-object atlas packing.
Baker: Gpu Lightmapper is best for game developers, 3D artists, and architects generating production-ready lightmaps in Blender.
Baker: Gpu Lightmapper is completely free to download and use.
Baker: GPU Lightmapper uses OptiX for AI denoising on NVIDIA GPUs, but it is not limited to NVIDIA hardware. On other GPUs it automatically falls back to OIDN, so you get clean, noise-free results either way. Because baking leverages Cycles fully on GPU, a compatible GPU is central to the workflow, and Baker includes VRAM estimation that alerts you if a bake may exceed your GPU memory before it begins.
Baker: GPU Lightmapper provides four bake modes: Full Global Illumination, Indirect Only, Ambient Occlusion, and Emissive. Quality is highly configurable, letting you adjust texels-per-unit, maximum resolution between 512 and 8192, GI bounces from 0 to 16, samples from 1 to 4096, padding, ray bias, and backface culling. An AO Distance slider appears in the GI panel when Ambient Occlusion mode is selected, giving control over the effect relative to your scene scale.
Baker: GPU Lightmapper can generate lightmap UVs automatically using Smart UV Project, which replaced the earlier box projection method for cleaner results. You can also disable automatic UV generation entirely and bake into any existing UV map on your objects. A dropdown in the UV Atlasing panel lists all available UV maps in your scene, so you simply select the one you want and Baker uses it for the bake.
Baker: GPU Lightmapper is listed as free in this catalog. Licensing terms can change over time, so check the developer's page from Egret Studios LLC for the current details before you rely on it in a project. The add-on installs into Blender and lives in the 3D Viewport sidebar N-panel, showing live progress during a bake and allowing you to cancel at any time with the ESC key.
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