Do I need Special High End PC for Lightmapping?

Questions & Answers
1

HI,

I am working on a MMORPG game with huge maps (Exteriors and interiors). We are baking lightmaps with normal/ low setting but still it takes lot of time and even crashes sometimes.
I wanted to know if I need a High-End PC configuration for baikng good quality light-maps or am I making some mistake. Also the baked lightmaps are very large in size (~1Gb per scene ). Is it normal??
I am attaching a snapshot of my settings.

70277-light-mapping-setting.png
70277-light-mapping-setting.png751×1028 74.4 KB

Thanks for the support.

2

That’s completely normal. Computing lightmaps for large or intricate scenes takes a lot of processing. Many pro studios have custom servers built just to run lightmap calculations on. So, if you’re using a consumer PC, yeah, it’s going to take a while. Usually you want to calculate very low-res for testing, and only calculate the hi-res ones for major updates or polishing, and I usually let the lightmap bake run overnight for good measure.