Sometimes you need to bake all lighting into the diffuse color of the texture.
Open shader ball for example, fill layer with any reflective Smart Material, bake your reflection and it creates reflection layer in texture.
It picks up any light you have set up in render room, including environment light.
If bake is too dark try modifying setting intensity.
If you wish to bake light without environment “light from render room” is not necessary anymore, because you can achieve the same result by using “light and reflections” in flat shading mode.
Map Type
Light Based Curvature: more correctly calculates the result on UV Overlap; black areas no longer appear on different objects which have the same UV coordinates.
Thickness: Similar to AO, it casts rays from the surface of the mesh to the inside (modifying radius value). It can be used in SSS shading.
Light From Render Room: If you wish to bake light without an environment, use “light from render room” instead of “Light and Reflections.
Subsurface Scattering: Use this settings to get rid of the dirty shadow lines on the subsurface scattering.
Translucent: A translucency color map can be used to vary the translucent color of a surface. Use it to recreate glassy materials.
Bent Normals: Benefits of Using Bent Normals. They combine the ao and normal map together to get better occlusion for indirect light and reflection.
Light and Reflections: fill the layer with any reflective Smart Material, bake your reflection, and it creates a reflection layer in the texture layer.
It picks up any light you have set up in the render room, including the environment light.
Local Curvature: calculates curvature on objects with a normal map and analyzes the model’s curvature in many projections pixel by pixel, which allows you to get a more accurate and beautiful result. The radius and intensity can be adjusted.
Local Curvature RGB: Bakes curvature with radius 1, 20, and 100 to RGB channels, respectively. (Use RGB cavity as the default cavity calculation method can be set on Preferences).
RGB Cavity map
The new RGB cavity was introduced as a possible default calculation method. In this case, the multi-range cavity will be calculated on the GPU, and additional control in UI of conditions/smart materials will appear, the “Cavity width.” It allows for variation in the cavity width/smoothing in real time, which is very important for realistic PBR texturing.
Cavity width (using the RGB cavity) may be used for smart materials for each layer separately. Each material layer has its own cavity width settings. It allows for much better effects for “aging” materials, like several differently “aged” layers of paint.
RGB cavity is a multi-range cavity texture, each channel corresponds to a different cavity scale. B is the local cavity, G is a middle-range cavity, and R is the far-range cavity.
If you already have the old cavity layer in the scene, you need to delete it to use this feature. This is a very significant feature for the PBR painting over the texture/mesh.
If the RGB cavity is enabled by default and you are loading the scene that has the old-style cavity layer, the Coat will warn you that it is better to re-calculate the cavity to get better control.
Global (light based) curvature and local curvature are related to the geometry of a surface.
Global (light based) curvature refers to the overall shape of a surface and is a measure of how much the surface deviates from being flat.
For example, a sphere has positive global curvature, while a plane has zero global curvature.
Local curvature, on the other hand, refers to the curvature of a surface at a particular point or over a small region.
This curvature can be different from the global curvature and can vary from point to point on a surface.
For example, a sphere has positive local curvature everywhere, while a parabolic cylinder has positive local curvature in some regions and negative local curvature in others.
Tutorials
Light Baking Tool: This video covers the Light Baking tool in 3DCoat.
Baking Lighting & Reflections in Unlit Shader: This video briefly shows how to bake a PBR material along with reflections and lighting into a texture for an unlit shader.