I’m working on a Unity project where I need to optimize performance by baking lightmaps for my prefabs (the prefabs should always look the same regardless of their position so there is no point in using realtime light here). While I understand how to bake the lightmaps, I’m struggling with the best way to store them directly within the prefab asset to ensure they work seamlessly when I instantiate them during runtime.

I placed the prefab in the editor’s scene view and played with the lighting to get the desired result. my goal is to now save the prefab with the lighting data to instantiate during run time.

Questions:

• What’s the standard workflow for embedding baked lightmaps into Unity prefabs?
• If storing lightmaps into prefabs isn’t a thing, what would be a good solution to this problem?

Additional Notes:

• I’m using Unity version 2023.2.11f1. The tutorials I found are related to Unity 5 and include components I don’t have.
• The prefabs are always instantiated in the same scene (in case there are any scene-level solutions to try).