What term describes precomputing lighting in Unity and storing it for runtime use?

• A. Realtime GI
• B. Baked Global Illumination
• C. Light Probes
• D. Shadow Mapping

Answer: (B)

Baked Global Illumination describes precomputing lighting for runtime use. In Unity, this means the lighting calculations, especially how light bounces and fills spaces, are done ahead of time and stored in lightmaps. At run time, those precomputed values are applied to surfaces, so static scenes render with realistic indirect lighting without performing expensive calculations every frame. This approach is efficient for environments that don’t change, since the lighting is fixed after baking. Real-time GI, on the other hand, computes lighting as the scene runs, which supports dynamic changes but costs more at runtime. Light Probes provide indirect lighting hints for moving objects by sampling lighting at specific points, rather than baking the entire scene, and Shadow Mapping is a technique for rendering shadows, not for precomputing global illumination.