I wanted to have a portable lightmapper that is part of a custom map editor that I was building in C++. Thus I chose to build CPU powered lightmapper.
And to my amazement, it is really fast as OpenImageDenoise works like magic and the noisy CPU path tracer result gets smoothed out. The lightmapper is based on design described by the creator of Bakery-addon for Unity.
First, it creates the lightmap UV space GBuffer with multipass rendering to emulate conservative rasterization. Secondly, it offsets the sample position by raytracing from each sample position. It checks if the sample position resides inside geometry and offsets it to redure shadow leaks. Thirdly, using Embree it path traces from the sample positions and builds the lightmap. Finally, the lightmap is filtered using the OpenImageDenoiser.
The only downside is that the OpenImageDenoise is huge. The .dll takes around 45 megabytes (compared to my exe ~700KB). Anyway, I think it is worth having as it speeds up the path tracing result significantly. Here is a screenshot of preliminary result.
