Needle Engine Blender Addon 1.5.0
Highlights
Much faster lightmap baking
Denoising now runs once per atlas instead of once per object, and single-user meshes are packed into the atlas in place instead of being duplicated. Combined, these can cut bake times dramatically — a 20 minute bake on one of our test scenes now finishes in about 2 minutes.
Lighting mode dropdown for lights
The “Lightmapped” checkbox on lights is now a clearer “Lighting” dropdown (Realtime / Baked), and you can optionally include render-only lights (disabled in the viewport) in a bake via the new “Include Render-Only Lights” scene option.
Needle Engine 5.1.12
Updated dependency, fixing mirrored and negatively-scaled instanced meshes rendering incorrectly.
- Add: “Include Render-Only Lights” scene option for lightmap baking
- Add: Warning shown under the Lightmapped toggle when a bake is about to take over an existing UV map
- Add: “Baking lightmaps” message shown in the 3D Viewport while a lightmap bake is running
- Change: Lightmapped toggle for lights is now a “Lighting” dropdown (Realtime / Baked)
- Change: Lightmap UV cache now stays valid across more bakes (previously invalidated on unrelated changes like atlas resolution) and hashes faster on dense meshes
- Change: Single-user meshes are packed into the lightmap atlas in place instead of being duplicated during baking
- Change: Improved lightmap margin calculation and per-object atlas area allocation
- Change: Updated to Needle Engine 5.1.12
- Fix: A lightmap bake no longer permanently overwrites the scene’s Cycles render settings (bounce limits, adaptive sampling, Fast GI)
- Fix: A lightmap bake no longer retypes/restores the Blender editor area it was invoked from, which could disrupt the user’s layout
- Fix: Lightmap baking progress indicator and wait cursor now cover the whole bake (including UV unwrapping and atlas packing), not just the Cycles render pass
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