So here I am in 2025 and nope, I cannot bake lighting into a skeletal mesh.
Yes, it’s a niche request, so I’m not really all that bothered. But here’s a valid use case in 2025:
We’re making a mobile VR game. All lighting must be baked. No dynamic lights allowed.
We have a bunch of vehicles that have to be skeletal meshes (deforming parts), that only articulate, but don’t physically move across the ground.
They would look great if I could bake lighting on them, and they would properly bake shadows onto the ground. As it is, they don’t cast shadows properly onto the baked lighting ground, and they don’t have near the definition of the surrounding static meshes for light and shadow.
Can I take it into blender, reproduce the lighting only approximately, and bake that into our textures? Yes. Does that suck? Also yes. With one toggle, I could get seamless baked lighting that integrated with my scene.
I wouldn’t mind being able to to that, but here in the future, I see it as a very low-priority request.