Lightmapping is a simple technique for baking high quality lighting information into textures for static lighting environments. This process gained popularity in the mid 1990s for its visual quality and efficiency, and continues to be used by modern games when performance is the top priority. There are several common
methods of computing lightmaps, but approaches generally fall into one of two categories: direct and indirect (aka global) illumination.
This lecture walks through the basic process of lightmap generation. I originally presented this talk for a computer graphics course that I completed during undergrad. For more information about this work, check out my global illumination project page.
