Hey guys,
So I have complex levels. My first level is about 40 rooms plus adjoining corridors. I wanted to get an OC bake done on it. Really, just to see what it does for my frame rates. [My frame rates are mostly pretty good due to heavy use of LOD and some scripts I have on the dynamic lights that adjust their ranges as you get further away from them, but in a few places there are frame rate drops that I’d like to take care of].
Using Automatic Portal Generation, I got a bake fairly quickly (less than an hour), but the results were disappointing (my frame rates actually went down). So I decided to try PVS and Dynamic Objects setting (which seems like the one I want to use anyway since I have a lot of static geometry).
The settings I used were a cell size of 1, a near clip plane of 0.1, and a far clip plane of 150,000. I started it at 10 AM, and at around 10 PM (12 hours later) it was still chugging away. But some time during the night it failed with a “Run out of memory in PVS sampler - Try increasing cell size” error.
Okay, that’s fine, I could do that, but I’m wondering about that far clip plane value. Of course, 150,000 is a totally ridiculous number, the player does not see anywhere near that far. I actually had the camera set to 1,500 originally, which is still further than the player can actually see before the fog takes over. But the problem with that is if I set it that low, it does bad things to the shadows (deferred rendering), causing them to flicker badly. So I had to bounce it way up to 150,000 to fix that.
But for the purposes of the OC bake settings, could I set that value back down to 1,500? The popup tool tip says that setting ought to match the largest far clip plane of any camera in the scene. What happens if it doesn’t? Will I get usable results? And will that reduce the memory usage and bake times (I would think so?).
Before I start up another 12 hour bake that may or may not give me good results (or even successfully run), it would be nice if I knew what reasonable values I could put in for the parameters of the bake. Does anyone have any experience with this sort of thing?