Umbra’s nice, but it’s pretty darn slow even for modestly sized scenes. I come from an offline rendering background so I’m used to overnight renders. Lightmapping in Unity is nice and fast, but Umbra takes forever in comparison.
I just spent 16 hours rendering an occlusion scene of modest size (my windmill town demo) on “extremely high” settings, only to find out the next day that it threw an error involving out of memory or something about my graphics card. Is Umbra safe for overnight renders? Does it throw the error if the hard drive sleeps when idle (it only does this when nothing uses the hard drive and the computer has been idle for a while)?
Either way, I lost 16 hours work, because Umbra seems to not like overnighters.
The time it takes to render I don’t mind in the long haul, since I only have to do it once per build, but if Umbra isn’t overnight-safe, then that’s a problem.
Any UT devs want to chime in? I’m gonna file a bug report about this.
Also, if it was an out of memory error, it might have something to do with the view cell size (that we recently got in beta 7). What’s a good size that it should be at? I have it set to 0.1 but in the docs it’s set to 0.01 and the default seems to be 1, so I just went for something in the middle. What’s a good size to have it set at? What’s the memory/accuracy tradeoff?
Thanks! 
its overnight save but expects that you work within the borders of your hardware, if you try to use low range hardware with high++ settings, you better use many view areas that restrict where the oc is calculated
My hardware is fine. 4 gigs of memory. Unity can only access something like 2 or 3 gigs memory at a time, so I know the hardware isn’t at fault.
unity can access up to 4gb on a 64bit os though
if it claimed that its related to gpu by the way, even having 2TB RAM wouldn’t help if you have a low end gpu like a 9600gt with 128/256mb vram
I have a 512 mb gpu which isn’t bad. The error said it’s either out of memory or a graphics card problem. However, it also mentioned something about if the computer was locked, that would be a problem. My computer wasn’t sleeping during the night, but it might be a problem for Umbra.
I mostly just need to know what the view cell size should be set at, since that may have been a contributing factor.
computer lock must not mean sleep. it can also mean that you have a screensaver. that will lock the pc which naturally won’t make the job an allnighter anymore. (windows key + L for example locks the desktop directly, comparable to screensaver + password)
I don’t have a screen saver. The computer merely goes into a black screen, which it’s done a couple of times, but it doesn’t affect Umbra.
In comparison, I’ve done PLENTY of overnight renders in my 3d graphics package and the next morning my renders are finished. Although, I doubt Umbra reacted to my computer being unused for a long time.
I’ve re-rendered the scene with High settings this time, and it seems to be MUCH faster. I’m going to check out the memory usage once it’s finished.
potentially the memory.
But as mentioned, thats what view areas are for
never forget, the calculation of that stuff ends with octtrees, so going from 1 to 0.1 raises the memory consumption by a factor of up to 64 at worst (8 childs per nodes + 0.1 is over 2^3 times smaller than 1)