Hi funk,
Thank you for your feedback.
funk wrote:* Baking seems to be quite slow
This statement is objectively subjective
so I'd like to know what you were expecting. But before, note that the samples per seconds you'll get depends on many factors and is not directly comparable to regular rendering. Also, when rendering a UV map, it's likely that most of your pixels will be populated with geometry, in contrast to other configurations where many rays might escape to the environment and some geometry might be hidden from the camera. This being said calculating a baking camera ray is more expensive than for a regular camera ray although that's a relatively small part of the overall pathtracing process.
Here I am attaching a sample scene that contains two equivalent render target setups so you can compare.
funk wrote:* Bakes at 16000 samples still end up being noisy - even on really simple stuff like baking the default daylight into a colored sphere on a plane.
We had some issues with noisy outputs in previous builds, but they seemed to have been fixed already, can you provide an example where this is happening using the latest build?
funk wrote:* "Use Bake Position" does not bake the faces the camera can't see. All unseen faces are black. This has got to be a bug.
I am not sure what is your setup and what you are expecting to get from enabling that parameter. Some time ago
I posted an example about how this and other parameters affect to how the camera rays are generated for texture baking.