What aspect of lighting does lightmap resolution primarily affect?

• A. Animation fidelity
• B. Detail of baked lighting textures
• C. Physics accuracy
• D. Audio latency

Answer: (B)

Lightmap resolution controls how finely lighting information is encoded into the baked textures. A lightmap is a texture that stores lighting for every pixel on a surface, so raising the resolution increases the number of texels representing that surface. This lets you capture finer variations in shadows, shading, and indirect lighting on small details, yielding crisper, more accurate light and shadow transitions. With a low resolution, shadows look blocky and transitions blur because there aren’t enough texels to represent the lighting variation. The other aspects listed—animation fidelity, physics accuracy, and audio latency—aren’t affected by how lighting is stored in lightmaps. Keep in mind that higher resolution uses more memory and longer bake times, so you balance quality with performance.