Can/Should I bake lightmaps in a completely dark room?

Questions & Answers
1

My scene is completely dark. Everything is static. I can bake light maps, but the only light source will be a realtime point light that the character moves around.

Can I use lightmaps? If there were lights in the scene that were baked/mixed, I wouldn’t be asking the question, but considering there’s only one light that is real time, what are my options? The main reason I’m asking is so I wouldn’t have to use Ambient Occlusion as a post process effect, but just have it baked into lightmaps. Thanks!

2

As far as I know, real-time ambient occlusion is impossible with modern hardware, unless it’s the screen-space pseudo-version (seen in Crysis, for example). And ambient occlusion requires a light source to be of any value anyway so…

I wouldn’t bother baking. You’ll just be adding a bunch of black textures to your final memory footprint.