Unity 2018.1.0b13 Progressive Lightmapper Progress Percentage missing?

News & General Discussion
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I had very high hopes for the lightmapping to be very much improved in this latest beta for 2018. Man, what a disappointment. So the Enlighten baker is taking just as long as it has in past version, just a silly amount of time for a simple terrain with some simple shapes on it. I actually had to kill the lightmapper after 10 minutes because I just felt it was ridiculous to wait for such simple geometry in the scene.

So move on to the Progressive Lightmapper, expecting snappier results or something to that effect. I don’t know how it’s doing because I don’t see a progress bar or percentage anymore. In fact the progress bar that’s there does not move at all anymore. I just sits there perpetually stating “baking”. That’s not very intuitive or helpful. What the heck? Feels like two steps forward, three steps back. I thought there was a team working their butts off to improve these systems, but clearly this was neglected and by appearances, looks to be a regression. Unity 2017, the Progressive Lightmapper was buggy as heck, but it at least had a progress bar and percentage done…I could see it was working.

EDIT: As I’m typing this, 8 minutes later the Progressive Lightmapper is now showing this baking ETA information. Now it’s telling me I have 20 minutes of bake time left for an extruded race track path, a fence around it and a terrain. No trees, no foliage, nothing complex at all. I just do not understand what is happening to the Unity I knew and loved. I’ve been using it since 2008 and man what I wouldn’t give to go back to the 4.6 days. Our once “lightweight” engine can’t bake lightmaps faster than Unreal engine these days. I have Unreal 4 installed as well, I hit Rebuild Lighting and even my mid range complexity scenes are fully baked in less than a couple minutes.

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Not to mention cleaning the GI cache will require to bake again.
I miss the Beast so much not because of it’s speed and quality, but also it’s not scene-scoped.

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I’m really liking the direction Unity wants to head in regard to visual fidelity. I got sick of the negative stigma on “Unity” games, but now all of the engines are visually coming on par with each other…or at the least very close. This lightmapping situation though is just…ugh I don’t have words. Enlighten just sucks, no one should wait that long to bake simple scenes, or wade through a long list of technical settings to “speed” up bake times. It should just work out of the box…with maybe minor tweaks for unique scenarios. So knowing I don’t care for Enlighten I had high hopes, very high hopes for the Progressive Lightmapper, but now it too seems to be slowed down. It was MUCH snappier when it was in experimental preview. It didn’t work with Mixed Mode lighting though and that was an ordeal. I am not sure if they’ve fixed the Mixed Mode lighting thing yet or not I didn’t test for it.

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Are you referring to the CPU-based implementation? Because there is an upcoming GPU-based lightmapper. :wink:

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I have moved all the static lighting process outside since Unity 5, and write my own realtime lighting to avoid different release behaviour, just want to keep things as stable as possible. Today my only hope towards Unity is lightweight and bugfree.

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Oh thank god. Well this is the best chance at a salvation for the lightmapping system.

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