This is the documentation for Enlighten.

Bake instance types

Owned by William Joseph
Sept 07, 2020
2 min read

The Enlighten baking API supports direct lightmaps, indirect lightmaps and ambient occlusion lightmaps.

Each instance type (selected by setting the type field on the instance in the .scene file), interacts with baked lightmaps as follows:

  • Radiosity
    These have direct, indirect and ambient occlusion lightmaps. They contribute to other direct, indirect and ambient occlusion lightmaps. This type has no requirement on probes. These instances are included in the radiosity precompute, so modifying them will invalidate the precompute (and bake).
  • Static Set Dressing
    These have direct, indirect (lifted from probes) and ambient occlusion lightmaps. They contribute to other direct and ambient occlusion lightmaps. This type requires probes to be present near them in order to get plausible indirect lighting. The main benefit of this instance type is that they are not included in the radiosity precompute. This makes the precompute faster and the instances can be moved without invalidating the precompute (a rebake is obviously required). Since they do not affect the radiosity they are mostly useful for smaller objects or distant objects that only need to receive radiosity.
  • Fully Dynamic
    These have no lightmaps, and do not contribute to other lightmaps in any way. Thus they can be used for geometry that is moving at runtime.
    This type requires probes to be present near them in order to get plausible indirect lighting. Direct lighting and ambient occlusion must be handled in the runtime. This type of object is useful for characters or other dynamic geometry. Baked indirect lighting is achieved by rendering from a baked probeset.


Enlighten baking treats instances with type Probe Radiosity the same way as instances with type Fully Dynamic. To get correct results when rendering, it is necessary to render your own shadows for these instances.

To avoid this, you can change the instances with type Probe Radiosity to use the Static Set Dressing instance type. Instances with this type can be rendered in the same way as Fully Dynamic instances, but are also included in shadow computations for baked lights.