Is it possible? Because rendering everything on a single Core 2 Duo isn’t quite cutting it…
Bumpity bump.
It is not currently possible with Unity.
So how do you guys bake lightmaps for larger levels? It takes hours on a single processor for even the tiniest amount of objects.
Lightmaps baking speed depends on more stuff not just on CPU.First you will need more RAM and free space at C disk at least 4GB.What are your lightmapping options?
You need to optimize your settings; it should not take hours to render a tiny amount of objects. I rendered this scene out with full quality settings in about 30-40 mins:
If it takes you hours to render something less complex, then you’re not using Beast efficiently.
Note: That was rendered with a 2.5GHz Xeon, 4GB DDR 667 (pretty low end machine)
That scene looks absolutely gorgeous. How exactly do I optimize? Just decrease the resolution on objects?
Most likely you need to decrease the resolution. If I remember correctly from another thread you have your texel resolution set to 50 which is pretty high for most scenes. Of course that also depends on the resolution you have set per object. I’m working on a similarly sized scene to i3DTutorials’ atm for an upcoming demo and I can bake the whole thing out at preview quality in under 5 minutes. Of course I have the resolution set to very low (about 5 which bakes it out to a single 1024x512 map), but it gives me enough of a preview to see if my lighting is the way I want it.
Other things to turn down are the number of bounces, FG rays, amount of samples per light, and AO. But these things effect the results so it’s best to simply do previews at lower res and then do the high res bake over night or during lunch break etc. You’d be surprised though how low you can go with regards to resolution and still have very nice looking lightmaps. For example, each level in ShadowGun uses a single 1024x1024 lightmap.
I’ve lowered my resolution a lot, and for most objects it didn’t matter. There’s one object that looks absolutely hideous now, but I guess that is because I can’t UV map.
Didn’t matter as in the quality is the same? Did the bake time go down?
Unity does a pretty good job of unwrapping the UVs for lightmaps, but in some cases nothing beats doing it by hand. Especially organic shapes.
Bake time went down massively, from 2 hours to 20 minutes. I never learned how to UV map and all tutorials on the internet just show how to do cubes.
How does that teach me how to UV map an actual model?
Ah well, Blender’s smart UV project seemed to do something useful this time.
Hi Wolfos, Also the number of final gather rays is a major factor in bake times, you should try to put that low (you will get blotchy lightmaps), then increase it until the blotchiness is gone for a final bake. Also Beast does use multiple cores for lightmapping, so a better CPU with more cores will improve things… If money is no object, you could get 2 of these and put them into this for a 24 core machine!
hehe, on my shopping list… one day 