NovaBake — GPU Lightmap Baker

NovaBake — Cross-Platform GPU Lightmap Baker

Bake production-quality lightmaps on ANY GPU — AMD, NVIDIA, or Intel.

Pure Unity Compute Shaders. No CUDA, no OptiX, no external executables,

no native plugins. Optional inline DXR hardware ray tracing on Unity

2023.2+ with silent software fallback.

=== CORE PATH TRACER ===

• BVH-accelerated GPU path tracing on Unity Compute Shaders (SAH-based

build with 32-bin binning, stack-based traversal, Möller–Trumbore

intersection).

• Multi-bounce global illumination (1–8 bounces, Russian Roulette,

next-event estimation with MIS).

• Direct lighting for Directional, Point, Spot, Rectangle, and Disk

Area lights with stratified jittered sampling.

• Sun disc soft shadows for directional lights.

• Emissive mesh lights with NEE.

• HDRI / skybox importance sampling.

• Light portals (NovaBakeLightPortal) for interior apertures with

balance-heuristic MIS against sky importance sampling.

• IES photometric profiles (LM-63 1991 / 1995 / 2002 with TILT).

• Subsurface scattering / translucency approximation (NovaBakeSSS).

• Hemisphere ambient occlusion with configurable radius and intensity.

• Light linking (atlas-granularity rendering-layer mask).

=== LIGHTMAP OUTPUT ===

• Shadow Mask (up to 4 Mixed lights per texel) for Unity's Shadowmask

mode.

• Light Probes (SH L2) baked from LightProbeGroup positions.

• Directional Lightmap (SH L1) for normal-map-aware bounce response.

• Reflection Probe baking with Auto-detect / On / Off mode.

• Output formats: RGBM PNG, HDR EXR, TGA.

• Per-atlas assignment via Unity LightmapSettings.

• Prefab-friendly persistence via NovaBakeLightmapInfo.

=== QUALITY AND DENOISING ===

• NLM (Non-Local Means with feature buffers) — industry-standard offline

path-traced denoiser, default for the High preset. The same algorithm

Cycles, Arnold, and RenderMan ship as their reference non-ML option.

• A-Trous wavelet denoiser (default for Low / Medium presets, available

on every preset).

• SVGF variance-guided denoiser.

• OIDN external hook (IDenoiserBackend) — third-party integrations can

register an OIDN backend; the binary is not bundled.

• Cycles-grade firefly suppression: per-light direct clamp, per-bounce

indirect clamp, neighbourhood firefly filter, soft final-pixel cap.

• Variance-based adaptive sampling (texel-targeted refinement).

• Texel dilation for seam-free lightmaps.

• Deterministic bake seed for reproducible CI bakes.

=== GPU PERFORMANCE ===

• Hardware ray tracing via inline DXR RayQuery (Unity 2023.2+ with a

DXR-capable GPU). Direct shadow rays, indirect closest-hit + shadow

rays, and AO traversal all run on the GPU's RT cores. Up to ~1.5×

faster than the software BVH on outdoor scenes. On by default; silent

software fallback when unavailable.

• AMD-tuned Wave64 BVH traversal variant for RDNA hardware.

• Wavefront / stream path tracer (experimental) for heavy GI workloads.

• Vendor detection with adaptive thread-group sizing.

• Async-readback path for atlas export.

=== EDITOR WORKFLOW ===

• First-Run Wizard.

• Quality presets: Low / Medium / High / Custom.

• Preset JSON import / export.

• Three programmatic demo scenes (NovaBake → Generate Demo Scenes →

Interior / Outdoor / Showcase).

• Scene density and UV chart overlays.

• Scene-view baked lightmap overlay.

• Before / After slider.

• "Why is this dark?" diagnostics tool.

• One-click Repair Current Scene + Fix Project Settings.

• Progress bar with phase name + ETA.

• Incremental rebake (dirty-object hashing).

• Prefab Stage baking (Ctrl+Alt+P).

• Batch-mode CLI for CI pipelines (NovaBakeCLI).

• Distributed baking across LAN workers (deterministic packing manifest;

plain-text TCP, trusted networks only).

• Per-renderer scene gizmos (AO radius sphere, GPU workload ETA).

• Runtime bicubic (Catmull-Rom 5-tap) lightmap sampler HLSL include for

custom shaders.

=== RENDER PIPELINES AND PLATFORMS ===

• Built-in Render Pipeline (official).

• Universal Render Pipeline (official, auto-detected).

• HDRP — bakes run on the generic code path; HDRP-specific features are

not enabled. Built-in or URP recommended.

• AMD, NVIDIA, Intel GPUs.

• Windows, macOS, Linux Editors.

=== REQUIREMENTS ===

• Unity 2022.3 LTS or Unity 6 (6000.x).

• Built-in or URP render pipeline.

• Any GPU with Compute Shader 5.0 support.

• Editor-only — zero runtime overhead.

Hardware ray tracing additionally requires Unity 2023.2+ and a DXR-capable

GPU (AMD RX 6000+, NVIDIA RTX 20-series+, or Intel Arc). NovaBake silently

falls back to the software BVH when these requirements are not met.

Full source code included. No obfuscation, no binary blobs. Comprehensive

user guide, feature reference, NLM denoiser deep-dive, and Bakery

migration guide.