Doesnt it depend on which type of baking you are doing? I think baking a whole scene at once is not that great anyways, I mean the more im learning how to bake character materials from high quality renderers and other assets, the more it seems you can apply that to whole environments.
For example- bake separate objects at separate times just to get the AO/g.i. lighting/material information from the renderer’ & export to texture the same way alot of game assets are already currently made made. Then you can modularly adjust them and put them all together in the engine with tweaks to make everything flow. Like bake the terrain first then bake your rocks and buildings separate and use the same workflow that are already doing for characters and props, no?
This wouldnt work if you want shadow info for stationary objects without dynamic lighting for example having to have trees & terrain baked together but I’m thinking of this method more for still having realtime shadows but since our current realtime g.i. solutions wont be ideal for a long time this could make that pass for us?