I hadn’t used the Beast lightmapper since the early U3 versions and I didn’t use it much because I found it was too slow (about one hour in my scene and many times it crash before completion) and for the tedious process to preparing the models (generating lightmapping UV’s takes many minutes with some models like simple mesh terrains).
My scene is not very complex, but obviously is not only a group of cubes like in the docs examples.
Now in U4 I have tried Beast again and it is the same, it is too slow even in low quality, using low resolution maps, and with only one Directional light on scene.
Here: Intel i7, 8 Gb Ram, Geforce 460 GTX 1.5 Gb., Windows 7 64 bits, Unity Pro 4.0
Beast Lightmapping can be a slow process, it depends on a lot of different variables. I would be interested to see your scene and also if you could time the baking process that would be cool to know.
Thanks, I assume it is indeed a slow process, but I think the actual process times are too exagerated.
I was using a little tool called Gile’s for lightmapping, for years, and it was a whole lot faster than Beast.
Especifically one of my scenes is a medium sized mesh terrain (without trees or grass) with about 40 rock models (800 polys each), two simple buildings, some crates, and other props, three big oil drums, and some columns, In total less than 100 “Static” meshes, and one Directional light.
I have noticed the generation of lightmapping UVs takes a very long time on the terrain mesh, this mesh (the terrain) is about 10.000 verts.
How I said, it takes about 60 minutes to bake this scene. I have tried with other similar scenes, with different models, and the result is the same.
This scene runs very fast on my machine, so it is not a performance problem.
Intel i7, 8 Gb Ram, Geforce 460 GTX 1.5 Gb., Windows 7 64 bits, Unity Pro 4.0
I’m not sure if this is expected or not, I do know terrains do increase bake time dramatically which is probably something we may be able to optimise, I would suggest reporting a bug to us, using the bug reporting tool in the Help menu, please attach your project.
Sort of - They requested a 3.5 version of the map, which I cannot give them. However, I did find out what was triggering the slow down and memory usage, and I did add that information to the case, so it’s super-easy to duplicate (as you see on the other thread, Eric5h5 duplicated it as well). I have not heard back since then. The case number is 512356.
Thanks for the link.
As it seems it is not too hard to implement this feature so it should definately be on the ToDo list.
Of course it would be best if the slaves could be unity basic licensed.
I’m looking at your scene now, I’m seeing the export to beast taking ages regardless having a normal map texture on the Terrain, but I’ll follow up with you via the bug report rather than this forum thread.
@Cascho01, I couldn’t possibly speculate on what we might and might not do as I don’t know the answer, but if you want to ensure it will be on our ToDO list at somepoint in the future, add it to feedback.unity3d.com if it’s not already there and maybe it will get voted up.