Runtime Lightmap Baker

In-game progressive path-traced lightmapping.

Supports Unity 6

No need for pre-baked lightmaps
100% baked in-game
Zero RTX required
All platforms
URP
BIRP

Get it on the Unity Asset Store

Visit our product page

Play the demo

In your browser, or download for Windows

01 — Overview

Watch the trailer

Captured in WebGL, running pure 100% HLSL.

02 — What it does

In-game Unity lightmapping for procedural levels and meshes

No need to pre-bake lightmaps. All at runtime, done in seconds thanks to progressive GPU lightmapping.

In-game lightmapping for procedural levels and meshes. No need to pre-bake lightmaps in the Unity editor — everything happens at runtime, and it is done in seconds thanks to progressive GPU lightmapping.

No RTX or DXR required. By using compute buffers with a 100% HLSL fallback (shader model 3.5 and up), Runtime Lightmap Baker runs on every platform and scales cleanly across WebGL, phones, Macs, consoles and high-end PCs.

Why developers choose RLB

True runtime lightmap baking

Generate soft shadows, ambient occlusion and global illumination during gameplay. Perfect for worlds that are created or modified after your game has launched.

Built for mobile, VR & WebGL

Real-time GI is expensive on constrained hardware. Bake the lighting once during loading, or progressively in the background, then render with the efficiency of traditional baked lightmaps.

Integrates in minutes

No complicated lighting pipeline to configure. Add the Runtime Lightmap Baker component to your Unity scene, choose a bake profile, and start baking.

Real-world use cases

Player-built worlds: Players construct a house, place walls, windows and lights, then trigger a bake. Within seconds the scene converges into beautiful baked global illumination while runtime performance stays high.
Procedural generation: Generate an entirely new dungeon, city or world from a random seed, bake the lighting during the loading screen, and start gameplay with high-quality static lighting every single time.
User-generated content: Let players create and share their own levels. Bake the lighting automatically after editing, so every custom map ships with polished, production-quality lighting.

Perfect for

Procedural games & roguelikes — bake lighting for newly generated worlds at runtime.
City builders & sandbox games — re-bake after players construct or modify their environment.
User-generated content — give creators professional baked lighting without external tools.
Level editors — bake lighting directly inside your game’s own editor experience.
Architectural visualisation — instantly relight after changing a layout or interior.
Mobile, VR & WebGL projects — the visual quality of baked lighting, with runtime performance intact.

Stop compromising between dynamic worlds and beautiful lighting. With Runtime Lightmap Baker, your Unity game can generate production-quality baked lighting wherever and whenever your gameplay requires it.

Requirements & dependencies

Render pipelines. Works with the Built-in Render Pipeline (BIRP) and the Universal Render Pipeline (URP).

GPU requirements, checked at runtime with a clear error if unmet:

At least 4 simultaneous render targets (MRT)
RGBAFloat texture sampling
Renderable ARGBFloat (FP32) and ARGBHalf render textures

Compute shaders are not required — the baker runs entirely in fragment shaders. Devices below this level (GLES 3.0 class hardware, for example) are detected and abort before baking.

Demo scene only. TextMesh Pro Essentials (Unity prompts to import on first open) and the Input System package, whose InputSystemUIInputModule the demo’s EventSystem uses. Neither is required by the baker itself — its runtime assembly has no package references.

Third-party notices

Asset uses Arimo under the SIL Open Font License 1.1 in the documentation PDF; see Third-Party Notices.txt in the package for details.
Promotional material features “Garage Workshop” by Gabro Media, used with the creator’s written permission. Check out his amazing asset here.