Hi all, while regenerating the Baked lighting in my scene, I went out for a bit knowing it would take some time, came back to notice Unity had Crashed, so I reloaded the project, all the baked lighting was missing so had to start from scratch, now I’ve noticed Unity is using over 25GB of ram and Climbing while baking the lighting, is this normal? I understand its using the CPU to do the baking so 100% CPU is fine, but does it really need to use that much RAM? It has never consumed that much RAM before, it would usually be between 6-11gb
This is pretty standard when it comes to baking lighting in Unity. Unfortunately, they don’t have any sort of limiters on the resources that Unity can use while it bakes the lighting, so it usually just takes whatever it can. There are of course third-party programs that you can use to combat this resource hogging issue but that leads to a different topic. The amount of time and resources baking can take fully depends on how you set up your scene and its lighting settings. If there are many different objects and lights in your scene and/or very high light mapping settings (i.e., 4096 light-map size with many light bounces) then it will take a significant amount of time and resources, even on really good hardware, to bake. It is usually just a matter of finding the right balance of render time and render quality, because the hardware basically has a certainty of being heavily used in any situation. I’ve had some scenes bake easily and not use my hardware too intensely, but others a majority of the time where I can barely even navigate my OS and take a while to bake. Of course, everyone’s mileage may vary depending on their scenes and their respective hardware. Circling back to the original question though: Unity can and will use any resources it sees fit to bake the scene in the most optimal way it can, even if that means maxing out the hardware. Hope this was helpful :).