Lightmap bake stopping with no error

This has me totally confused.
Last time I did a bake, everything baked just fine. However, we made a few changes to our environment, which required us to re-bake. I set it up to bake again, and partway through (about 10-15 minutes in, it’ll say “Baking Textures” for a while before going on to Bilinear Filter, and then to Edge Dilation Filter, which is where it stops), the bake will suddenly stop with no error. It simply stops, and any mapping that may have existed before, remains (though, it doesn’t fix the issue if I hit ‘clear’ before the bake).

I’d managed to narrow it down to 2-3 meshes that cause the lightmapper to respond in this way, but it’s confusing because none of these have changed since the previous bake, and I’ve baked them before. I’ve looked over their information in the Inspector view, and made sure they’re set to Static, have a UV, have Main Color properties (even though the lack of this normally causes an error, I checked just to be sure). I’ve also tried re-importing the asset, redoing the UV, and removing the object from the game world and replacing it with a fresh one. If I bake any given selection not containing these meshes, it bakes fine; but if I bake that mesh alone, or if the selection includes that mesh (or if I bake the whole thing), it stops only 10-15 minutes into the bake.

I’ve got my resolution set to 25 Texels Per World Unit (We have some fairly large models as far as world units goes, so we had to turn this way down. It didn’t seem to impact visual appearance too badly, so we stuck with it for now), Lock Atlas is turned off, no Ambient Occlusion, set to Dual Lightmaps with High Quality. These are the settings we’ve been using up until now. By the way, the resolution is low enough that no “Maximum Atlas Sized Reach” message is up on the lightmapper menu.

Does anybody know of any issues/settings that cause the lightmapper to suddenly stop like this?

Small update: Doing a little more troubleshooting, it seems to only do this if I have more than a certain amount of total surface area selected for baking (which explains why the bake all doesn’t work, either). I also tried to bake on a different computer, and it worked properly. The only change I’ve made to my system since the last bake, was an updated video card.

That said, are there any known compatibility issues between the newer Radeon HD 6xxx series cards and/or Catalyst, with Beast?

I have had this too from last night. I have increased the size of my level (only slightly) using models that are already in the scene, so there are no new meshes added that weren’t there before.

I’m baking using the same settings as before on the same machine (iMac) and it is getting to the very end and just finishing. Within the lightmapping window it is saying the Last Bake took time correctly, just no lightmaps are outputted.

Does anyone know reasons why this should be happening?

Regards,
Matt.

How much RAM do you guys have?

8GB.

I’ve found the problem for my case… it is the texture size. If i set the Final Gather Rays to 100 (just so I don’t have to sit through hours of baking) and the beast lightmap texture size to 4096x4096, it doesn’t output any lightmaps. Actually, that is not strictly true… it does if the required resolution is less than this (ie if 2048x2048 is enough). As soon as I up the texel resolution that would require a 4096x4096 it doesn’t output anything. If I set the texture size to 2048x2048 with a high texel resolution everything works fine (ie 2 x 2048x2048 textures)

Regards,
Matt.

I’ve got 6 Gigs.

I took Matt’s suggestion, and turned my max resolution down to 2048, whereas it was 4096 before. After making the necessary Texel Per World Unit adjustments, I tried a bake, and it seems to be behaving better, now. At least on one of the objects I was having a hard time with before (a fairly large structure).

My case was the same as Matt’s: the only change to the level was adding a few objects, whose meshes were in the level elsewhere. I don’t think we even added any rooms or anything this last build. Before this, I was able to bake quite a few things at the same time (several small structures, a bunch of objects, a couple of large structures, several terrains), and it worked just fine. But in this build, I’m lucky if I can get more than 2-3 hallways.

Would boosting my memory help this issue? I’ve noticed Beast eating up TONS of RAM, so I kind of figure it would. I was thinking of trying to get up to 8 or even 10 gigs.

@Nilore - Obviously I don’t know for sure, but I don’t think this is a memory issue. Within my level I don’t really have that many models (I would say a hundred approx). Like you state 2-3 hallways, I have about 6 rooms joined together with small corridors. The texture resolution of 4096 seems to be the factor.

If it is memory related then that is unacceptable… 8gb to lightmap a small level, i’ll have to go back to lightmapping within modo. Like I said i dont think memory is an issue with our problem.

Would be good to here from UT on this problem.

Regards,
Matt.

Just to bump, has the problem continued in 3.2 ? Is it fixed?

Just encountered this problem with my laptop. Anyone have an answer on why this is happening so i can fix it? Everything was baking fine… didnt add much to the scene.

update

my desktop works fine. Memory issue perhaps. 3gb in my laptop. 6gb in my desktop.