Since I am getting errors trying to light the entire scene I have tried baking on a per object basis,
but if I use the Bake Selected option it overwrites previous object baked maps.
Yeah, I think that is meant more for quick bakes of small areas to check lighting.
I agree, thats very like the intend, testing.
cause otherwise per object lightmaps is a horrible performance overkill unles we talk about pretty large models here
im sure that it what it is for.
it would be better if it wrote to the objects LM in the existing file though. so that you could see the smaller part in context of the whole scene fully lit.
that would not make any sense.
If you use select to build the LM it will ignore the rest of the world and just layout the 2nd UV channel on those models and generates a lightmap thats opted for exactly these models.
Thats a great thing for example if you group models within the editor and want them to be present and go away together, then you would use that selection to create the LM.
That would be important also if you want to alter a LM on the fly during gameplay (for different time of day / seasons for example)
Ok, understood, the selected object is for testing, makes sense.
I hear so many glowing reports about how easy beast is, etc. and I finally found (through UT blog video)
that I need to select the “create UV map” in the model’s properties,
however more than a few just crash Unity when I try. In fact, some of my major models.
Frustrating.
(error reports filed)
You can create a second UV layout of non-overlapping UVs all in the 0,1 space and not select to create a UV map and beast will use your given map instead.
" create a second UV layout of non-overlapping UVs all in the 0,1 space"
Not a clue what this is, though I see it referenced in the error messages.
I’ve had some really good luck with the default Beast UVs. The image here has no lights, just emissive textures and some basic settings.
I’m still trying to figure out how to get a full scene to render in less than a couple of days… My primary scene right now is a 5 story apartment building, and I want to Beatialize the whole thing.
I think this might mean leaving my machine on to render for like a week.
Is there any rumors about being able to net-render with a LAN? I know Beast can do it.
A couple of days? Are you possibly setting the quality or resolution a tad too high? 
I’ve found opening an empty scene (instead of my large, Unity taxing scenes)
while doing the Generate Lightmap UV operation the crashes have stopped, which is a huge relief.
Hey aNT.
Yeah, I’m testing things out. Trying to figure out what ratios of Resolution and FG Rays make a good render.
At the moment it seems that Resolution is more important to detailed areas like kitchen stoves (with those fiddly gas burners) than rays.
However, it seems that I have a weird problem with the Resolution setting. I have two objects with the same UV mapping size (1m x 1m x 1m). However the left hand (yellowish) object is about 4 times bigger than the right (greeny) one. As you can see, it appears as though the Resolution setting can only increase the size of the UV map by a certain amount.
At 12, both are roughly the same size. On a render of this, the shadows (while too blotchy to be useful) match each other quite well.
At 24, they are still both the same size. Again, I want more resolution than this. But here’s where the larger (left) object’s Resolution stops. No amount of increasing the Resolution setting will give me any more detail.
At 90, you can clearly see what’s going on. The smaller (right) object gets a lot more shadow resolution.
I tried using the Object tab’s Scale setting to increase the scale of the larger object’s UVs, but that seemed to have no effect.
Perhaps I should ensure that most of my objects are roughly the same physical size… That would be very tedious, but possible. Right now I have a single mesh for the inside walls of an apartment, and then a separate, smaller mesh for the kitchen.
Hey Clamps,
Please reduce the resolution of your posted images,
the very large images make the formatting of the text run out of view on a smaller monitor resolution.
It used to be 1600x1200 was large resolution but it’s being dwarfed these days.
It’s probably maxing out the lightmap texture size. If you split the object into two or four objects then you could up the resolution on the offending object.
Of course you’re right Don. I have a large monitor, so it makes me lazy. I’ll reformat the ones I’ve posted.
Niosop, I think you’re right. I’ll give that a go.
Thanks Clamps, very helpful, sorry for the inconvenience.
@dreamora sure, those are valid points but,
it does make sense for iteration on large maps where you don’t need to re render the entire scene (which looks like it may take hours on a big one) just to see the section you are working on.
Also because you may want to see the area you are concentrating on in context with the other parts of the level.
Actually, I am not exactly sure why all the lightmaps need to go away from unselected. this should be an option IMO.
The problem with this is what do you bake? Only selected things? So do you select the ground and nearby objects so they get AO, GI, shadows? That would cause the shadows on the ground from all the non-selected items to go away. Or if you leave the ground unselected, then the things your baking won’t affect the ground.
You could maybe manually do what you want to do by selectively baking the lightmap you want, copying it to something else, and manually assigning it via a lightmap shader. You’d loose the auto fading unless you wrote your own shader and/or code to handle that.
It’s really not worth the trouble. Just bake small sections at a time to check/tweak them as you build, and when you’re happy do a full bake of the whole thing.
I agree that we should be able to keep individually rendered lightmaps.
Also, I think the 256 lightmaps limit might bite some of us on the ass.
if you get the 256 per scene limit to bite you, you should reconsider if targeting 1.5GB++ gpus only is really smart at all (cause at that amount of lightmaps and the problem that you believe to have hit the wall, I expect any of them to be 2048x2048++ and cover a reasonable area to prevent suicide performance from too many material and texture switches)