Light baking tools and real-time rendering engines for 3D lighting differ in processing methods, performance, and use cases. Baking precomputes lighting data (e.g., shadows, global illumination) into lightmaps during production, reducing runtime GPU load and suiting static scenes with fixed lighting. Real-time engines calculate lighting dynamically at runtime, enabling interactive/dynamic environments (e.g., moving lights, changing scenes) but requiring more hardware resources.
Choose baking for static lighting and performance optimization (e.g., mobile games); use real-time engines for dynamic, interactive scenarios (e.g., real-time simulations).