We almost completed LightBeam, a tool developed to bake lightmap across multiple computers for super short baking time.
We’re currently testing this beast (heh) with 10 nodes and it’s really awesome!
Being able to change lights or baking parameters and then see the result in a couple of seconds or minutes is really cool and time saving for us.
We’re making a FPS game and scenes are obviously big. LightBeam allows us to reiterate super-fast and obtain results better than we could have ever achieved because it’s currently simply too crazy to reiterate bakes with only one computer.
Also I haven’t tried it yet but there’s no reason it shouldn’t work: distributed baking will allow us to bake lightmap for our big environments with the Monte Carlo algorithm.
For those who don’t know, it’s an algorithm that gives visually better result than the standard unity’s FinalGather algo. It’s been implemented in Lightmap Extended but until now it was really just a dream because baking lightmaps with monte carlo takes an enormous amount of time… With lightbeam and some spare computers we are able to laugh at this ^^.
Current features are as follows:
- Bakes lightmaps in EXR file format effectively keeping both the shadows and the light information contained in the HDR file format unity uses.
- Works with lightmap size 1024, 2048 or 4096.
- Rearranges objects on lightmaps automatically to optimize unity’s render batching.
- allows us to bake the scene with an unlimited amount of nodes (a render farm or simply a couple of computers).
- Add a node super easily by running unity and starting the LightBeams node component.
- Tweak the scene on the master computer as many times as you want, then click bake and let the tool do the rest for you then reiterate if desired.
- Effectively allows you to stay seated in front of the main computer without the need to run around the different other computers to perform tasks.
- Works with lightmap extended as well as manual beast xml tweaks.
FAQ:
-
How much faster does it bakes stuff?
If all computers have the same CPUs, you basically divide the baking time by the amount of computers. If not they will respectively be faster or slower compared to each other’s but they will all run at 100% of their ability so as long as you have more than one node you’ll be performing bakes faster that without it. -
I have two computers in total, can this do?
On the current implementation the master computer don’t perform any baking task, but its theatrically possible. -
Is there any difference in quality compared to Unity’s built in baking?
No absolutely no difference has been noticed until now. -
Does this work on MAC?
Right now it only works on windows, thought we could add MAC support. -
Does this require a PRO license per node?
Yes, we use unity’s built in beast to bake it and this requires a pro license.
There’s still some rough edges we need to fix to really make it become a stable solution, so I was wondering; are you guys interested in this tool? Would you buy it if say it costs 150 bucks?
We’ve spend much more time than I initially decided (more than one month 7/7 + over time) on this tool and are able to use it in production internally but to really make it a quality product we still need to work two weeks or more on it.
Unfortunately we have more important things to work on (Storm United, our FPS title), so unless I see real interest we’ll leave this on the side until we have more time to take care of it.
Please help us know if it’s worth the work or not by voting the poll 
Kind regards and keep up the good work comming!
