BeastLightmapping Crashes my CPU

Unity Engine
1

I’m at the point that all the way from unity 3.3 and now unity 4 Beast has always been the only process that crashes my cpu because it uses all the cpu cores, normally when running it makes my cpu go to 100% automatically, wheter the resolution is low or high in numbers it’s still the same factor. now this is the same result when i run it on the macbook pro that i have except that it hangs for a while so i’m only able to lightmap very small simpler scenes regardless if i do the option of baking selected. and it’s more or a big process if there is a terrain in there since it creates a separate lightmap for the terrain.

now i wonder if they could make it so it uses ram too in which i believe that it might not be possible.
so far the fix i have for it is right when i hit bake when using windows i have to ctrl+alt+ delete to bring the processes and then i click on affininty on the beast application and make it so it only uses 3 cores rather than all. by the way my cpu is a AMD Phenom II Quad Core 3.5Ghz.
other ways around baking i have done was to increase or decrease the size of the actual lightmap by a script that i found on the wiki for example if i make the lightmap size to be 512 besides the fact that i will get several files it bakes a lot more faster but objects that are big in scale besides the quality looking bad on the shadows sometimes if they are too big it crashes beast thus crashing my computer too lol.

now making the lightmap higher such as 4k besides having a good quality it’s just more time for rendering it in which for a simple scene could take me to hours.

so now i’m looking more at other solutions rather than baking inside unity since it seems to be unstable for my computer besides the long process of baking regardless of how small a scene can be.

2

What are your settings for Beast? Do you use XML files for custom settings…? Do you have adequate cooling for your system?

3

How much ram? beast is heaviest on this.

4

Tell me about it… I got 12GB just for this…

5

well i did tried messing with the xml and attempted to put it on its lowest settings or the lowest i can get it, besides producing bad result since it would be to low every once in a while it makes my computer crash regardless. for ram i have 16gb now no beast doesn’t uses ram, i wish it did in a way lol rather than using all out cpu.
and yes i have adequate cooling for my pc, from internal fans and it’s even near my AC. if i put a can of beer under my pc it would keep it cool for a bit since the table i put it on it’s not a full solid table.
and yes like i mention before the one fix i found was to go to the task manager select the beast process and select or make it to use less cpu cores.

now this mainly happens if i hit on the high quality button inside the regular beast setting withouth the xml settings. and with it. now if i leave it on low quality i still happen to crash every once in a while but at least i’m able to make a lightmap although its not a good expectation on quality.

so in the end i’m having to resort onto not using it. i even tried just baking the global ilumination itself withouth the ambient occlusion and i still get some of those crashing going on