Occlusion Culling keeps crashing

I have had no luck getting occlusion culling to work and over the past few months I’ve been readjusting settings, trying to find help on the forums, and I still cannot get this to work. Here’s the rundown,

The baking process gets all the way to the end and the microsoft C++ runtime error comes up and says it has caused the program to terminate in an unusual way.

Then once I close out, another box comes up saying that umbrapvs.exe has stopped running, either search online for a solution to the problem or close the program. I chose to close the program, because that other option has never worked in the past.

Then at the bottom in the console window I get a long error message that says:
“Error occurred in PVS computation. This is probably due to running out of memory or a problem with the graphics card. Try decreasing the near plane value or defining smaller PVS volumes. Do not lock the computer during PVS computation.”

As for the graphics cards, I’ve tried switching between which card is being used by un-bridging them and changing the cards on the GPU slots one at a time and all three at once.

The view cell size I leave at .01

As for decreasing the near clip plane, I’ve already done this several times from the default .3 to .2 to .1 then finally .01

The Far Clip Plane I leave at 1000

My target resolution I’ve left at medium, and the bake quality I leave at ‘production’ because I need this to look good since I’m ready to release it.

These settings are what I found on another Unity3d page that explained occlusion culling and what these settings should be placed at.

I’ve tried shrinking the size of the PVS volumes as close to the borders of the plane as possible, but if I shrink it any smaller, I would have to bake a whole bunch of PVS volumes around the level in order for this to cover the entire surface of the level. Am I correct in that guess? I don’t see any other way. I will say, the level is rather large in scale with some fairly complex geometry thrown in.

I have a decent machine for this type of baking and there should be no reason why the hardware wouldn’t be able to handle it. Here are my machine specs:

OS: Windows 7 Professional 64Bit Service Pack 1
Motherboard: EVGA nforce 780i
CPU: Intel Core 2 Extreme QX-9650
Graphics: 3 Nvidia Geforce GTS 250 SLI
Ram: 8 GB’s
Unity Version: 3.3.0.f4 Pro

The way it runs now is completely un-acceptable. It’s slow and choppy, is not anywhere as smooth as I need it to be, before I can release it. I’ve really cut back on the amount of geometry that I had the first time and I cannot keep cutting more detail. It’ll look awful if I continue cutting more. I really need a solution to this and I’ve exhausted so many attempts with this demo, letting it bake for days on end, only to see it reach the end and give me those errors that I mentioned in the beginning. Please help, my thanks in advance!

It’s been two days since I posted and no response so I’m trying again. I’ve now managed to get to a place where it doesn’t crash on me. It completes and I can see it culling the map, but it’s still slow and choppy.
View Cell size is set to .01
Near Clip Plane is set to .01
Far Clip Plane is set to 40000
Bake Quality set to Production

Still just as slow as ever, why is this?

Nothing new. It does not even work in latest 3.5 beta (there is huge rework of Umbra), but I ve got email from unity QA, that in next beta will be some fix. So we will see.

yeah, this is total bull shit, I’m switching over to cry engine to use a real engine!