I have a single terrain with a height map resolution of 1025. It’s 3200x3200. I’ve set the terrain lightmap size to 2048. On the “bake” tab, I set “Quality” to low, and set the resolution to “1” texel per world unit. (I’ve tried just leaving it with the defaults also). There are no meshes that need lightmaps in the scene. Zero.
Pressing “Bake Scene” quickly gets to “Exporting Terrain”, where it sits for about 15 minutes exporting. After that finally exports, Beast goes nuts, and eats up all available RAM, and 68 GB (Gigabytes) of Virtual Memory. It continues to consume RAM until I have to terminate it. I’ve let it run for several hours by clearing hd space up, and occasionally I can get it to finish lightmapping.
All this for a scene with a single terrain and 4 different kind of trees on it.
This is a completely new project that I created (didn’t upgrade it from unity 3). What can it possibly be doing to take SO LONG
to export it? I have one of the fastest SSD’s on the planet (can write over 500MB/s), and a quad core I7. Why would it need 68GB of RAM?
I had larger terrains with WAY MORE models (needing light maps!) in Unity3, and they would export to beast in less than a minute, and bake in 5-10 minutes.
I hope the Unity Devs have seen this, and are doing something about it.
Yes, I did. I hope something comes of it, and it doesn’t end up like all my other bug reports.
During the export process, it seems to be creating thousands of png files, and thousands of meshes for beast. This behavior is really different than 3.5, they’ve killed lightmapping on terrains. At least on the Mac.
I tried lightmapping with a terrain using the settings you mentioned, and it took a max of 1.44GB and completed in about a minute or so. (On a Mac.) So I guess it’s something specific to your terrain/settings.
Thanks, your times / memory usage are about what I was seeing in Unity 3.5.
Your experience led me to recreate a sample terrain to see what is making it go crazy. I created a terrain of the same size, with similar topography, textures, trees, etc. Each step of the way, I built light maps, and it worked great, just like it did for you.
The last step, I changed the material of the terrain to a material that supported normal maps - and then that’s when the export went crazy.
My conclusion: Lightmaps and normal mapped terrain are hopelessly broken.
Hi ! Thanks for the tip on normal maps !
Same thing on a Pc, after a very long export for terrain, beast was eating all the ram with just 5-10% proc usage (taking ages then, return to editor without any lightmap…).
Then i removed all normal map on terrain textures - didn’t change anything - then i remove the main “base terrain material” (from nature/terrain/Bumped Specular >>> set to none) - and now it’s working like before, in few minutes and with less than 3-4 gb of ram !
My lightmaps are taking over 10 minutes to calculate because terrain takes ages to export and it’s absolutely demolishing my workflow. I’m not even using a normal map with this particular terrain, or a custom material.
It also takes about 4 hours to lightmap on Low and 1.5 days on high. However nearly every object in my world has normal maps. In the other thread, it was mentioned there’s a known issue with bump/normal maps at the moment? My issue currently is with how Beast is packing textures, routinely using only about 1/4th of a 1024 atlas, generating over 256 atlases and bloating bitmap memory usage on runtime, also blowing past the 256 atlas limit (unless I manually increase the allowance, again increasing bitmap memory usage).
I also had a terrain export issue, when I had a much larger terrain object, most of it flat (since I had at the time not yet painted out more terrain). Upon testing a Low bake, I let it run all night and when I woke, it was still at 1% generating GIs. Once I removed the terrain and went to a smaller one, it got to a more usable time.
