What is a Lightmap Baking process and what steps are involved in Unity?

• A. Lightmap baking steps: Mark static objects, Bake in Lighting window, configure lightmap resolution and GI settings, and bake lightmaps.
• B. Enable Global Illumination in project settings only.
• C. Bake without selecting static.
• D. Nothing to configure.

Answer: (A)

Lightmap baking precomputes lighting into textures so static geometry can render with indirect lighting without heavy real-time calculations. In Unity, the workflow starts by marking the objects that should participate in the bake as static. Then you open the Lighting window, configure the desired settings (such as lightmap resolution and GI options) to balance quality and performance, and finally bake to generate the lightmaps. The bake produces textures that get applied at runtime, giving realistic lighting without dynamic computation.

Enabling Global Illumination alone doesn’t produce lightmaps; you still need to mark static objects and perform the Bake step, and you typically ensure lights that affect baked geometry are set to Baked or Mixed mode. Baking without marking static would miss those objects, and there is indeed essential configuration to control quality and performance.