Today I attempted to bake a scene - not a large one and while it was baking the lighting, there were two unity job processes running that utilized 100% of my CPU in total. This…really REALLY scared me because even with liquid cooling, my processor has -never- ran that hard. I’m using a Sandy Bridge I7 3930K (6 core hyperthreaded so 12 virtual cores). I could feel the heat pouring off of it and my fans desperately trying to keep it cooled.
I understand that baking lighting is processor intensive but is there any way to prevent it from using 100%? There’s no need! 50% is more than sufficient in most cases and even Photoshop rendering doesn’t use 100%. If it runs that hard, even though it flies through the rendering, it could damage my processor, and to be honest - this could damage many other processors of lesser quality.
Unity this is a MAJOR issue that needs to be addressed. At least in my humble opinion because I’m sure Unity won’t dish out $800 to replace my processor because their app ran it too hard and it became damaged…
That last paragraph made me laugh out loud. Relax, people render very complex 3D scenes using both GPU’s and CPU’s, running for a week 24/7 and I’ve never heard of anyone suing Autodesk or Maxon for physical damage to their computer parts. If your CPU overheats, it will shut down your computer before it damages the CPU anyways. CPU’s don’t just burn out like light bulbs.
Heh well apparently I would assume that even the moderators had to laugh at this one. I am a bit paranoid since I’ve never seen my processor jump up like that before and it really did feel like someone put a heat lamp next to my leg. I’ll monitor the cpu temp and if it’s an issue then I’ll see what other solutions I can have. As it’s obvious its doing whats intended I should be thrilled.
While this is not a solution , I do agree on the point where, for some team, being able to limit the CPU usage for baking the lightmaps of a scene is required. For small team (or individuals) who work on a limited amount of PCs, having the process of baking map to take 100% of the CPU makes it impossible to work on something else during the baking process.
For example, during the baking process, you might want to read online about something you’ll be working on soon or you might want to look up for some references or even do some minor corrections to textures or UI.
You’re stuck at either waiting for the baking to be finished or to having an hard time since other software are limited to 3%-4% of the CPU at all time during the process.