How do I lightmap a very big scene without crashing?

Unity Engine
1

I have a scene with couple hundred meshes and 9 terrains 2000x2000. Unity crashes even if I try to bake-selected 1 mesh at a time, because it exports all the other “static” meshes and terrains, before calculating lightmap. It crashes during that export phase (I have 12 GB RAM, i7, Radeon HD 6950, if it has something to do with this).

I tried to mark JUST this one single mesh “static” and uncheck on other meshes. Then it bakes fine, on that single mesh. But, if I uncheck “static” on baked mesh, and check some other mesh to bake the light, the previous mesh looses the lightmap.

In conclusion - There is NO WAY, Unity can lightmap my scene all at once, without using NASA supercomputers. Also, it seems, bake-selected function is a “scam”, since it tries to calculate all meshes and terrains in the scene anyway.

Yet, I don’t believe that Unity simply can’t handle lighting big scenes, that would be nonsense…

So, please tell me, how do I approach this and lightmap my giant scene? P.S. Is there some way to use other computers in the network to count lighting (like in Unreal’s Lightmass for example)?

2

You can keep your lightmaps if you copy them to a different folder or rename them (Within Unity so it carries over the import settings) and assemble the maps and atlas settings by hand later. Just make sure that each object has one texture sheet to make your life easier. (Shouldn’t be a problem for the terrains at least.)