Well thanks for that reply, that gives me a better overview on the challenge you guys are facing, and please don't get me wrong I understand perfectly how hard is to develop and still having to keep a full time job at the same time, I didn't meant to urge you guys.

Will this always be like this? I mean, packing solves the problem but I'm working on scenes with huge amounts of textures and objects, packing all of them results in blend files up to 10 gb. Will there be in the future a way to keep all assets linked? Thanks!

Oh... sad to know its not posible. Yes, reduce baking time is my main objective. Well, render times baking lightmaps depends on the amount of samples, bounces and material complexity, its just like with a render. In order to bake a nice clean lightmap into a 4096px image I usually have to go up to 2000 samples and that could take around 2hours, which is not that much but I need to bake lots of maps and of course scene complexity will also affect baking times. The issue with baking lightmaps outside Unity is that is very hard to match both lighting enviroments therefore I was searching the way to get fast bakes in order to go back and foward between both softwares. I've done distributed baking before with Vray and works very smooth but right now we are out of resources for new licenses for 3dsmax and vray. I can understand texture baking is not the most demanded feature but with all the new game engines, where textures have a big role, I think it would be a nice feature to include.

Hi James, thanks for answering. Basically I'm trying to bake lightmaps to export them to other softwares such as Unity. The process is basically the same as Baking just the diffuse color into a texture map, I'm no completely sure if the data is stored the same way as a render but it is kept in the .blend until is saved externally. I'll give a try this afternoon and check if it does work, but I think baking is somehow different from rendering. Hope you guys get to keep developing this addon!