After “Bake” pressed can Unity be closed? Will beast do the job without Unity running and after opening scene again will lightmaps be imported?
After “Bake” pressed can I load other scene while Beast is working on scene I let it to bake?
Is there some build-in render quee for Beast?
Example:
Scene “Menu” is finished, I want it to bake so I hit Bake. Beast start to render it. If 2nd question is positive I open scene “Level_01” and I eventually finish it before “Menu” is baked. I hit bake button while in “Level_01” scene. Will be “Level_01” added to quee? Or my computer will run another instance of thebeast.exe*32?
If there is render quee, can I control priority somehow?
If you close unity all operations will stop too, this also means lightmap baking. you can minimize it but not close.
There would nothing be to import if you prevent it from generating the data.
I was thinking but does it not only place files in corresponding folder?
After bake Unity should pick lightmaps the same way as other stuff…? At the end it’s only bitmap… All data should be known even before bake will finish… Right?
I noticed that when I move some asset into project folder and then open Unity it will auto import. Cause before it wasn’t there and Unity doesn’t “touch” it before. I’m baking now for some while and I like to swim in known water so I ask I’m not willing to test it [take risc] right now… I’m tight on schleude…
dreamora thank you for answer…
Anyone else willing to answer other questions?
bake does place files correctly, but if you don’t bake it completely you don’t bake at all and will have to redo it again. you can not bake part after part for example.
so either you run the full operation or nothing.
also, beast once in with all its major features, will have nothing to do with “just bitmaps” anymore at all in Pro (especially light clouds etc). Already the dual lightmap part differs a bit from “just a bitmap”
So ok 1st should be more or less answered…
Can I open another scene while baking current? And work with it? Unity should be ok with that I think cause beast is separate process… Or? Anyone, please can make quick test of this? And after rendering load previous one to verify that it’s ok?
Unsure on the opening, my intuitive answer would be NO as unity does not allow to open a scene while keeping one open. but the editor might be an exception. but you will see it as you surely get a message box tht warns you that lightmap calc is stopped if you really load
As for the last two questions: the answer is no.
you can only bake the scene you are in.
But you can write an editor script that you fire up through batchmode from console (potentially pro only) to switch trhough scenes and bake one after the other. if you do that the answer to 4 is fully up to you as you define the order in which the scenes are baked
Thanx dreamora… Helpful as usual kudos. So my questions got answered.
For Unity Developers… Batching in Beast or baking on background would be VERY helpful… cheers.
In Unity 2.x, any higher order operation that used 100% of all your cores actually locked unity with a progress dialog. now it works hand in hand allowing you to continue to work
(thats why I’m not fully sure on what happens if you switch scenes but you will find out fast. normally you though don’t want to work on it will baking as you can’t touch shaders, materials etc as they might be in use … also, taking away cpu time means it will take even longer and you potentially allocate RAM you better left for beast if you don’t want to see it fail due to out of memory exception)
I think that Beast exports scene and then working with that copy of it… Right now I’m still building my scene while I’m baking for preview…
By rendering on background I mean that it is fully separate process so I could use Unity in a way that I’m normally using… Working, building scene, creating prefabs, opening other scene. (not another Unity instance I mean by that)
Here is sample of test bake… Some objects were added during bake… No problem here.
Unity does not even use multithreading (or being threadsafe), so I wouldn’t put too much hope for multiprocess and similar $$$$$$ engine stuff.
Also, an own process thats again a unity editor should potentially work out of the box but won’t solve the memory border problem, you will hit it anyway and see beast / umbra crash flat out in such a case
Nice art there btw
and yeah modifying the scene you are baking while you are in is indeed no problem.
yes it is, unity is a 32bit application and major parts of the assets are always in ram … so you will find out rather fast that HDR textures like the ones generated during lightmapping can fill up the remaining 2-3GB extremely fast
(I’m myself on win64 for years now with a core i7 and its corresponding max of 24GB RAM)
I’m not willing to test it [take risc] right now… I’m tight on schleude…
And thanx.