Bake Lightmap to a larger scene

Unity Engine
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1

I am currently trying to bake the lightmaps for the interior of a house. I currently have the settings on a mid-high range. It is on a much higher quality than my initial testings, but there are still some artifacts, and I am considering up-ing some values eventually.

I am currently encountering an issue with the baking process however, when testing with the full scene. This error happens both in the current settings, and even the low quality test settings I was previously using.

If I do this with all the main structure but no furniture, baking goes well w/out problems. The issue here, of course, is that the furniture will not have their shadows on the floor and walls.

7053541--837127--upload_2021-4-19_12-16-30.png
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If I try it with 1 or 2 rooms, like the living room and dining room, goes w/out problems too. This is the target look I am going for.

7053541--837115--upload_2021-4-19_12-1-36.png
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My problem now, is that when I try this for the entire house, will all the furniture activated, this error happens.

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I have read thru some discussions on the forum and other websites on this. Many were from years ago (2018 and older) and were often an issue with the new versions of Unity. I also do not think this is the case, since it works for the other setups, and only fails when I have the full scene.

I saw one solution, which is not applicable for me at the moment. They mentioned getting a higher end graphics card or farm baking. I only have one work computer I do not have physical access too.

Is there any workarounds to this, that doesn’t involve more than 1 computer or upgrading hardware?

A theory in my head is having multiple lightmaps for each section of the house. Is this idea possible? Basically, I will hide everything but the dining room, and only bake a lightmap for the DR. That way I can bake each area 1 by 1, and combine all for the final build.

2

You are running out of memory on your GPU. Either reduce lightmap size, or switch to CPU lightmapper.

1 Like
3

Are these the only solutions possible? This is pretty much the bare minimum I could go on the settings already. Anything lower and there are many funny stuff coming out in the light map. I actually need to eventually increase them later on, for a more high quality result.

The CPU lightmapper, looks like a possible solution. But the ETA on baking is hours++. I could try it tonight after work, and leave my PC to baking it overnight.
7056982--837934--upload_2021-4-20_6-36-16.png

These are the furniture prefabs in the scene. All the 1st floor ones (+0) can bake fine on their own. Same as all the 2nd floor furniture, even on the higher lightmap settings.

But when I test for all, even on the bare minimum settings, I encounter this problem
7056982--837943--upload_2021-4-20_6-40-43.png

below is a test bake using 1024 lightmap size (from 2048)
I get to bake the entire scene, which is good. but the lightmap quality isn’t that good.
7056982--837949--upload_2021-4-20_7-23-14.png

4

Indirect lights are always noisy and increasing the bake time
You can use 180 degree spot light to simulated behind window indirect light
Because direct light does not make noise and creates high quality shadows