When lightmapping my terrain, Beast chews up RAM like there is no tomorrow. I have 16GB of RAM, and Beast will eat 11GB of RAM, plus 14GB of Virtual Mem. (I’m on a Mac). This brings my system to a crawl.
Is there some way to lower memory usage? I didn’t seem to have this problem in Unity 3.5. It doesn’t matter what settings I’ve selected in the lightmap settings. I set it to low quality. Tell it to only bake the terrain. Lower the light map size for the terrain down to 1024. Set the texels per world unit to 8.
Is there some sort of config I can edit somewhere that says “please don’t use every possible byte of memory and virtual memory”? If using more memory is supposed to be a speed improvement, I would have to say that failed miserably. Baking the lightmaps seems to take longer by a factor of 10 or so.
It’s probably likely you’re using it for incredibly the wrong things. Take skyrim for example? all those big sweeping landscapes aren’t baked lightmaps, but baked vert colours. AAA titles hit similar limits, and either:
a) bake a mix of vert col and lightmaps
b) split stuff up so its baked in a sane way
Give that a try. Throwing beast at a few miles of terrain isn’t going to work out for anyone. Having said this, I’m shocked that unity hasn’t added baking to vert cols for beast yet, specially since its common in retail games.
I did what you suggested. Indeed, I am selecting the terrain only and baking it. I lowered the light map size to 1024 for the terrain also. This would bake in less than 10 minutes in 3.5. The only time I got it to go all the way through took nearly 4 hours in Unity 4. The other times it just locks my system completely up. I’ve done a memory scan to make sure I don’t have bad RAM also. Disappointing. I may have to just give up having lightmaps on my terrain. doesn’t seem to work with bumpmaps anyway, no matter what mode I am in or try.
But I agree - I would love to have Beast bake into vertex colors. Would probably look better than the really-stretched out lightmap anyway.