Comment by kcb
There's been a rumor going around that developers move away from prebaked lighting primarily because it complicates their workflow.
There's been a rumor going around that developers move away from prebaked lighting primarily because it complicates their workflow.
That rumor didn't exist 20 years ago when Half Life 2 had come out. Pre-baked was the only way to go. Now we have performant ray-tracing.
Prebaked lighting is a rather crude approximation that only looks good in certain scenarios. Correct dynamic indirect lighting provides a much better integration between different scene elements and better spatial cues. Movable and static objects can share the same lighting model and you don't get an immersion breaking situation where e.g. the one door that you can open in a hallway stands out because it has worse lighting. It is an overall win, not just during production.