How to Bake Indirect Lighting in Blender Eevee

Baking indirect lighting in Blender's Eevee render engine allows you to simulate realistic global illumination, light bouncing, and ambient color bleeding without the heavy computational cost of Cycles. This guide walks you through the complete, step-by-step process of adding Light Probe Irradiance Volumes, configuring their resolution, and baking the indirect lighting cache to produce high-quality real-time renders.

Step 1: Switch to the Eevee Render Engine

  1. Go to the Render Properties tab (the camera icon) in the Properties panel on the right.
  2. Set the Render Engine to Eevee (or Eevee Legacy depending on your Blender version).
  3. Ensure your scene has basic light sources (Point, Sun, Spot, or Area lights) and mesh objects properly positioned.

Step 2: Add an Irradiance Volume

Indirect light in Eevee is captured using Light Probes.

  1. In the 3D Viewport, press Shift + A.
  2. Navigate to Light Probe and select Irradiance Volume.
  3. A wireframe box containing a grid of probe dots will appear in your scene.

Step 3: Position and Scale the Irradiance Volume

  1. Select the Irradiance Volume and press S to scale it until it completely encompasses the interior room or objects you want illuminated.
  2. Press Ctrl + A and choose Apply Scale. Applying the scale ensures light calculations are calculated accurately.
  3. Position the grid so that the individual probe points (the dots inside the volume) do not intersect directly with solid geometry or walls, which can cause dark shading artifacts.

Step 4: Configure the Light Probe Resolution

  1. With the Irradiance Volume selected, open the Object Data Properties tab (light probe icon).
  2. Under the Probe section, adjust the Resolution X, Y, and Z settings.
    • Higher values add more probe points for finer light detail in complex scenes.
    • Lower values bake faster and consume less memory.
  3. Adjust the Clipping Start and End distances to ensure the probes only capture the necessary surroundings.

Step 5: Bake the Indirect Lighting

  1. Return to the Render Properties tab.
  2. Expand the Indirect Lighting panel.
  3. Click the Bake Indirect Lighting button.
  4. Blender will compute the light bounces across the probe grid. A progress bar will appear at the bottom of the window during calculation.

Step 6: View and Update the Results

  1. Change the 3D Viewport shading mode to Rendered (press Z and select Rendered) to see the baked diffuse bounce lighting.
  2. If you move lights, change materials, or modify geometry, click Delete Lighting Cache in the Indirect Lighting panel, then click Bake Indirect Lighting again to update the scene.
  3. For animated objects moving through static baked lighting, ensure the objects have standard materials so they receive illumination from the surrounding probe grid.