How to Turn Off Continuous Baking Unity 5 6
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Light Baking in Unity 5.5
Source: https://polycount.com/discussion/184703/light-baking-in-unity-5-5
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If you're developing for vr, realtime/pre-computed GI is not going to be your ideal option for most situations. A single room type setup might be doable, but beyond that you'l need some really good optimization to get it running at 90fps without dropped frames so baked is your best bet (even with 10x series gpu hardware).
As far as the hanging when adding objects i'd recommend disabling the auto-bake functionality if you haven't already as that seems to cause a lot of problems when you're rapidly changing your scene.
Its certainly workable, but if you're in the early stages of a new project i'd say its wise to start doing some tests in engine to see if it'l deliver what you need. Another thing to keep in mind is that unity 5.6 looks to bring some good improvements with the progressive baking system so it might start to get better soon.
RyanB: I've started to look at moving in the direction of using mental ray for my bakes, but i'm a bit concerned about the back and forth between 3d package and unity. Are you assembling everything in 3dsmax, baking then exporting, or exporting the scene from unity when you're ready for a bake?
If you can't work on your scene's lighting outside of Unity, then you are stuck with whatever they give you.
Mental ray is pretty dead. Maya is shipping with Arnold. I would probably use Blender Cycles before I would use mental ray.
@MikeF Cheers, thanks. We are definitely early in the dev cycle and I've been able to get some good results in Unity. However, the bake times are pretty significant, even with a relatively simple scene / optimized bake / lightmap settings. I actually just finished a bake that took about ~1 hr. Unity failed to write lightmaps for a couple objects. I'm concerned that while it's workable now, it won't really scale to the whole project efficiently.
I'd also second Ryan's comment on Mental Ray and take a serious look at Arnold. I recently used it on a project and really liked the workflow and results. It wasn't a game project, so I have no baking experience with it yet. It plays with the same PBR logic that's common in game dev and the learning curve wasn't too bad.
I've actually had no problems with enlighten so long as I use it properly - for a start you want to ensure that while working, you're using appropriate quality settings per gameobject, and appropriate settings globally for the context (i.e not a stupidly high quality bake while you're still iterating - last i checked it defaults to a reasonably high quality). And that you're not using it on terrain.
What are the per gameobject settings you've found to be most important? I'm guessing 'scale in lightmap' and whether the object is marked 'important', but maybe there's more that I'm missing.
Hey hi, Hope the link above helps. Lighting being broken has been resolved for most parts yet I get few issues time to time. However broken stuff at times come with how you have (a) model the mesh (b) does it come with hand authored lightmap UVs in line with Unity's mentioned method on how to unwrap for lightmaps and (c) single large mesh (like full house) or modular (assemble house inside Unity)
In my experience there is no one final solution / steps to get the job done, You have to deal with pros / cons depending on your approach like for me Flatiron bakes save memory that lightmaps use though biggest draw back is any change to geometry in scene and do whole bake again. For modular scenes assemble everything, do changes and re bake within Unity this is also my preferred method.