Bakery - GPU Lightmapper (v1.96) + RTPreview [RELEASED]

Delete this folders:
Assets/Bakery/
Assets/Editor/x64/Bakery/
Reinstall Bakery from the AssetStore and then update it using the menu Bakery->Utilities->Check for Patches

If this doesn't fix it, it may be another asset from the store that is interfering with Bakery.
List anything you have installed from the store so we can help.

 

Ok after wayyy to many hours i found the bug!
So you bake a new scene and when it finishes, the lightmaps are not applied to the objects and not to the lightmapdata.asset . In my case this was because even though the lightmaps come out just fine and their imported as Lightmaps (at least when checking the import settings), unity recognizes them as a cubemap which shows in the preview window.

It turns out i had a preset in the PresetManager for importing cubemaps which are also hdr files. I would have thought that my preset for bakerys lightmap files should have been preferred based on the filename, but that's not what was happening.

Though this still doesnt explain, why even when i was baking with Unitys Lightmapper, the Lightmaps would be gone when another team mate pulled and opened the scene (unity bakes .exr files). So i am still wondering about that.

Maybe this could be added to the troubleshooting guide? Check if Lightmaps are not cubemaps and check if your Preset Manager could apply wrong settings.

Edit/Update:
When i use the v1.9 Bakery from the Asset store, other team mates can open the scene i baked and the lightmaps work as expected. when i add the lates updates from github, the lightmaps are no longer applied / connected to the lightdata.asset file.

 

@Wawruch2
Terrific work ! Is there a way to launch the exe for VR or should it work right off the bat ? I'm using a Focus 3 with Vive Business Streaming so maybe there are some quirks with it.

 

Hello Frank,

I am seeing hundreds and even thousands of GC.Alloc under ftLightmapsStorage.Awake() every time I async load a scene which causes a frame stutter. (see attached snippet that is so big I cannot capture it all) My title runs on rails (Cinemachine) and thus has a very consistent run through. What is interesting is if I run my title starting midway on the track where the stutters are starting, I get less stutters, which indicates to me there may be an issue with garbage collection of lightmaps, yet the profiler outside of GC.Alloc, seems fine.

I am on URP with Vulkan but the same issue occurs on OpenGL no matter the versions of these too. I am on the latest Oculus Integration too v41 as I am a Oculus/Meta Quest title. Any insights as to the cause of this issue?

Also, do you have any tips on how to ensure async load, loads smooth with your lightmaps?

Thanks for the support!!!

 

I cannot scale the bounds of my Bakery Volume within my Lightmapped Prefab. The prefab itself represents a room, with its children being the actual meshes (walls, floor, etc).

When I create a volume component for the root of the prefab and try to scale it the object itself gets moved in the directions of the scale. I have also tried creating a box collider component and having the volume's bounds be set from that, but it only scales to the same values as the collider, not adjusting it's center.

Trying to wrap the volume to an object also causes the objects to move as well.

Example of Scaling the Volume moving the prefab (-X direction) (red vector represents translation as volume is scaled):

Spoiler

Lack of center adjustment when setting bounds equal to collider:

Spoiler

The first issue is very bizarre when dealing with prefabs. If I scale the volume, which moves the object, and undo the action it will only undo the volume rescale and completely ignores the fact that the object was moved, which I then have to manually reset.

Unless I am misunderstanding how to set them up, being able to directly edit the bounds or having the center adjustment calculated when synching to a box collider would be 2 solutions. Am I not supposed to attach the volume to the prefab's root?

Also, I have updated my materials to accommodate for volumes, and have read through the doc and found the URP Shader package. I'm a bit confused on some of the materials and subGraphs. Am I supposed to only use the Volume Sharers while in a volume, and then switch to a different one when I'm outside? If so what Bakery Shader would be comparable to the basic Lit shader (I am not using any directional mode, I see that some shaders are named after them)

 

Hi, I would like to ask to get rid of this validator, that asks if I really want to bake. This popup appears after some time, after Render was pressed. (I cannot just wait 30 minutes for it).

I have to bake big maps, and it takes half a day. I left my pc overnight, just to see in the morning if I really want to bake that many lightmaps. This means I lost a day of work. I know I can bypass it by batch baking and turning something off, but after the update this option was reset to the default on.

At the worse case scenario, this popup should be set to be off by default. Also, I think there should be no any kind of interruptions by the system, as soon as we press Render button.

 

I too would like to not see that same pop up if at all possible as I also have lost half a day here and there.

 

Hi, I am still getting out of memory errors. I have 128gb of ram, and RTX 3070TI with 8gb of ram.

Is there anything I can try doing apart from lowering the quality of baking?

 

https://geom.io/bakery/wiki/index.p..._get_an_.E2.80.9COut_of_memory.E2.80.9D_error

 

Thank you. I always do this already. I freshly restarted my pc just in case as-well. 8gb of vram should be enough. I was doing the same map baking with weaker gpu that has6gb. Sometimes it was successful, but it was crashing many times as well. The problem is somewhere else.

p.s I just had another crash after weekend of baking. Actually on the same percentage of 87%.

 

Ok, that's why it was crashing. There is no such GPU!

Is there a way to optimize ram usage, without scarifying the quality of the bake?

 

It's asking for 14Gb of vram. There is a reason people buy the RTX 3090 with 24Gb of vram!
Divide you render resolution by 1.5 and it should render with 8Gb of vram.

- Set the overall render resolution lower.
- On important objects, set their scale in lightmap to 2 in the renderer settings
- On unimportant objects, set their scale in lightmap to 0.5 in the renderer settings

https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/class-MeshRenderer.html#lightmapping

 

Hi!

Do local volumes (global unchecked) work with URP?
I can't get them to work even in the example scenes.

Unity 2021.3.5f1

Thank you!

 

Thank you, I did this before re-rendering again. The quality is great anyway. So this was my solution.

Regarding GPU. I think we as developers should also focus on optimization, rather than making users to keep get newer, and newer hardware. For example, Valve always do perfect job: great games runs on weak PCs.

 

Did anyone notice shininess/reflectiveness disappearing after baking?

Maybe my shader is missing something, or it is some baking properties that has to be set?

(It was similar with normal maps, they would not work in certain modes after baking)

 

I absolutely agree, but development also requires to precompute lots of stuff precisely to avoid doing it in realtime (like lightmaps) so in the end, you need to have a beefy development computer to end up with a high quality mobile game.
Actually, that has always been the case, even in the 80s: lots of micro computer games weren't even programmed and compiled on micro computers but on special development PCs that costed a lot of money, and nowadays console development kits are always beefier versions of the regular console.
You need room and power to create at ease, but then test the build on the target low end hardware.

Are you rendering in Directional Mode and using Bakery's shaders?
If you aren't, check out the manual here: https://geom.io/bakery/wiki/index.php?title=Manual#Directional_mode

Otherwise, it happens randomly that Unity can lose the directional maps in the editor, but just entering play mode and exiting back will fix it.

 

I am using Full Lightning and Dominant Direction. I have no problem with baked normal maps. I do however with shininess and reflectivity, those are completely gone. I am using my own shader.

Ah, it is because I no longer have any real time light. If I add one, then scene is over-lit, but then I have reflections. How to have reflections without adding any real time light?

 

That's the issue. You have to use Bakery's shaders if you want to have specular highlights on lightmapped objects.
Check the link I put up there.

 

@guycalledfrank .Sorry, here is the simple test scene. As the picture shows, the shadow of the cube on the hill(in red circle) seems wrong. I'm not really sure, maybe it is the terrain's height cause this problem?

 

Thank you, this is not an option for me. I am using uber-shader type, many special options and features.
Is there a way to implement shininess in this custom shader, so that the Bakery supports the shininess/reflections?

 

For Built-in Render Pipeline, if you know how to program shaders, yes absolutely: just open the Bakery shaders and take a look inside, it's pretty straightforward.
If you don't then no. Sorry.

Bakery shaders for URP and HDRP are in ShaderGraph format and include a subgraph to reuse on your own shaders, so it should be easier to implement on your own custom shaders.
https://geom.io/bakery/wiki/index.php?title=Manual#Bakery_shaders

If you are using a third party shader, you can try to contact the author and ask to include these Bakery features.

The problem is not Bakery, the problem are the shaders that lack this functionality: for example, the Unity standard shaders don't have this feature, so you are stuck without specular highlights on lightmapped objects.

Bakery shaders give you this functionality as a huge bonus.

 

Thank you, I can code shaders a bit and I will try it out once I have some spare time.
Other option would be to code all extra functionalities on top of the Bakery shader I guess.

 

Some small updates (via github/patcher for now):

1. So it looks like Bakery's point light sampling strategy was kinda biased, and wide penumbras showed some banding even with high sample counts. It was rewritten. The new option is well, optional, just in case, so there is no difference in existing projects. But overall, I recommend disabling "Legacy sampling" on your point lights from now on:

:



2. I also rewrote Light Mesh weighting a bit, and it now uses blue noise instead of white when blending near/far techniques. so overall you should get cleaner area lights.

...

Woah, thanks for finding this out. I never used the Preset Manager, I probably missed when it was introduced
Added: https://geom.io/bakery/wiki/index.php?title=Troubleshooting#Whole_scene_is_very_bright_or_black

Lightmaps are never connected to the asset in any way. Bakery stores them in a hidden scene object named !ftraceLightmaps. It has a ftLightmapsStorage script with the lightmap/renderer list and does the applying.
Is it still related to the Preset Manager?

You can actually use my debug tools (Debug select storage) to analyze this object and its data: https://geom.io/bakery/wiki/index.php?title=Community_extensions#Debug_Tools

Interesting, thanks. I'm not sure it's caused by the GC alone... loading lightmaps during runtime can generate stutters simply because of GPU resource allocation when loading them. I wouldn't expect Unity's async scene loading to ever be fully stutter-free with any kind of content (that's why I even wrote a separate texture streaming library for my game).

It seems to be also scene-dependent, as I don't see much of the GC impact in my simple tests:



Can you make any simple test scene with this GC spamming? I'll investigate it.

Yeah it kinda works like that... the center of the volume is the position of the gameobject. I recommend just having the volume as a child object.

Can you check if it's fixed in the latest patch? Sounds like something I fixed.

Ideally volumes are just everywhere the moving objects are and you can swap them like in the example_volumes_advanced demo.

I don't have a full Lit counterpart yet, but you can edit the graph and just plug any roughness/metalness/etc source in there.
Last time I tried to make a Lit clone, I've stumbled upon some bugs in the shader graph system which prevented me from branching on keywords, and I left it there... TBH I'm still under the impression that the whole shader graph affair was a wrong move and still hoping that some surface shader alternative will come to Unity (with all their pipelines).
Every time I try to do something with the graphs, I get random UI errors, long compilation times (competing with Unreal, I see!) and things that just don't work or lacking. I'm still kinda afraid of HDRP/URP, treating it like some volatile beta stuff. Maybe I should try it again.
But all basic PBR inputs are exposed in my graphs:

OK, just added this, please try patching:

That's quite a lot of time though... I'm wondering what is your world size and settings (and GPU). The longest bakes in my game are ~30 minutes. But I have a few-city-blocks-immersive-sim.

Even more intrigued...
16000km terrains? 2 billion terrain trees? With 100 texels per unit?
Out of memory is VRAM related, not RAM related.

I'd say, check this: https://geom.io/bakery/wiki/index.php?title=How_do_I...#How_do_I_lightmap_a_large_world.3F

Just imported my examples into URP, upgraded standard materials and changed train material to BakeryURPVolumeSpecGraph, and it seems to work:



Maybe you forgot the scripts on the triggers? Or globally disabled train/trigger collisions in physics settings?
Local volumes just replace shader parameters using triggers (or any other scripted way you can implement).

https://geom.io/bakery/wiki/index.p..._can.27t_see_specular_lighting_after_the_bake

Thanks! Yeah, it looks really weird, I can see it.
...so for some weird reason your terrain scale is 1,0,1:



It doesn't affect the terrain renderer, but it messes with Bakery, resulting in your terrain becoming a flat plane...
Setting it to 1,1,1 seems to fix it.

 

Does this include the directional map normal bug fix?
If I update, will it go back as it was before the fix?

 

I thought I had messed something up because I use my own shaders and it was just that I forgot to add the rigidbody to make the trigger work...

Sorry for the inconvenience Frank, thanks for the help

 

Hi

Each time I build a scene I'm getting a black environment and dynamic shadows are not working
I'm on 2021.3.6 and HDRP

(on the screenshot, 1 is black environment and 2 is static shadows only)

 

Originally it looked like this:

 

Thanks for answers. And thank you for implementing Supress all popups feature!

My scene is not large, 10 million polygons. I think it has complex geometry and also what might be making it computational to render is my shader complexity. I might be wrong though. My shader is using vertex blending and other types of texture blendings for all type of textures as normal, diffuse, shininess. It is also emissive, reflective, color masked etc.

I got the out of memory error solved by reducing GI bounce count from 5 to 3. I think the rest is default.

Regarding shininess, Reflection Probe has no effect after baking on static objects. Might be my fault somewhere, and I will investigate further.

Edit: it is my new shader fault, the old one was working fine. The old one was using Standard Specular technique, and this one is using Blinn Phong. Both works fine pre-bake.

Edit 2: it takes 2-3 hours to bake on overclocked RTX 3070 TI with 8gb vram, and it was talking half a day or more on 1070 with 6gb vram. I think I recall baking for more than 24 hours, but that might have been standard Unity's light baking.

 

Hi. After patching Bakery i get this eeror at the end of the bake.

Unity 2021.3.6f1 HDRP




Are there any tips what i can do?

These are my settings who baked great before...



This are the Group seetings.
Don t now why a mask is generated because of Full lighting seeting.
So no Shadowmask



This seems to be an error generated in new patches because the scene baked great in releases before

 

When i deactivate the LM_Group
the same error appears for the next LM group set to vertex

 

Does bakery support APV (found in HDRP) as a replacement for the old unity light probe system?
APV is a replacement for the light probe system of unity, can we use bakery for lightmaps and APV for objects baked with light probes?
Can be found in 2022.2 beta

 

No, but it has its own solution based on 3d textures: https://geom.io/bakery/wiki/index.php?title=Manual#Bakery_Volume

 

Is a mobile RTX 3050ti 4GB a viable GPU for Bakery when working on small to medium solo projects? Or will the VRAM be too small for anything non-trivial anyways?

And a little bonus question: how well do eGPUs fare with Bakery? Would the small bandwidth just totally cripple it?

 

It's alright: you can always decrease the resolution or decrease the maximum light bounces to spare memory and the results will still be much much better than Unity lightmapper anyway.
I would go for it

Personally I think it should work perfectly well: the bandwidth thing is only an issue with realtime games that need to push a lot of frames per second. For Bakery it shouldn't be a problem: the GPU never uses its full bandwidth with it, it's more a question of raw compute power and amount of memory.
External GPUs are absurdly expensive though, so unless you find a very good deal, you will be better off simply buying a better gaming laptop.
Things to keep in mind when buying hardware for Bakery:
- RTX is MUCH faster than GTX
- total VRAM is much more important than overall performance

 

Yeah, I'm really just trying to decide between an Asus ROG Flow X13 with a 3050ti and a Lenovo Yoga 7 without a dGPU right now. Both are small but powerful convertibles with 6800/6900 Ryzen CPUs und iGPUs and 32GB of RAM.
The Yoga 7 is cheaper and I like it more overall and the X13 has some really annoying quirks. Not sure I want to spent like 500-600€ more for essentially just the 3050ti. So I'm a bit concerned it won't be able to do much anyways. This pretty much seems to be true for the Unity lightmapper because of the small VRAM and I was wondering if it's the same for Bakery.

 

What is sure is that without a dedicated Nvidia GPU, you won't be able to use Bakery.
Have you checked the Schenker / XMG laptops?
They are super customizable and at a fair price:
https://bestware.com/en/

 

The key here is that it has to be a small (max 14") 2 in 1 convertible with 32GB RAM. That is very specific and there is not much on the market.

 

Bakery isn't working for me at all in 2021.3 LTS (latest). I also faced this same issue with 2022.2.a18
I'm using HDRP, tested both latest github and asset store versions

This is what I'm getting when I bake a full lighting bake:


As you can see the directional light straight up disappeared except on the roof. This is a simple scene just for testing bakery made with default cubes. I also tried this with other HDRIs, and other sky types. I use bakery to generate a sky texture for the sky light.

When I have no sky light, the sun light is back and works as expected with indirect light (but of course I need a sky)
so when I bring a skylight, the sunlight disappears. And If i set it to indirect only for the sun light, there will be 0 indirect light.

I tried everything I can think off, increasing indirect multiplier, etc.
Unity lightmap bake works fine

also tried increasing indirect sunlight, messed with exposure, sun intensity, sky intensity, no luck


The project is small, just bakery & HDRP, go to "outdoor scene" --
Download: https://mega.nz/file/lX4jhYwS#3nfUiqj_HT_rFz6sgZitjLez6tP5uErjoNwfncJwPe0

edit: tested with URP @ same unity version and it works as expected. This seems to be HDRP only

 

I don't have any experience with HDRP but I do know some people have had issues with HDRP light intensities in Bakery.
Read the manual here about HDRP specific things:
https://geom.io/bakery/wiki/index.php?title=Manual#Notes_on_HDRP.2FURP

Also, do the included sample scenes of Bakery for HDRP work correctly?
Because it could be an issue with your scene configuration or it could be a case of Unity breaking/changing things on new updates.

also be sure to read the Troubleshooting section of the Bakery wiki if the sample scenes are rendering right.
If the samples scenes are broken, then Frank will have to update Bakery.

 

I've used bakery with HDRP before in previous versions. When using bakery with HDRP all you have to do is use optix 7, and generate sky texture rather than place the cubemap in the sky light.

I've tested bakery with URP in the same version and it works as expected
I didn't know bakery comes with HDRP scenes, I'll check it out

 

If it was working before and it doesn't now, then it's clear that it's a breaking change on an Unity update and Bakery will have to be updated.

 

I'm on 2019.4.31f and I'm seeing an issue which is annoying, but not impossible to workaround:

If I bake the light for an area and then bake it in another way that results in a different lightmap for the same location, e.g. I do a world bake which results in the lightmap for an area in World-Lightmaps/Place and then I do another Sector specific bake of "Place" which creates a new lightmap of the same location, but this time Bakery puts the lightmap in World-Lightmaps/Place/Place (so the old one shouldn't be used anymore) the old lightmap still seems to end up bundled with the world when it's packaged unless I manually delete the old lightmap myself. There's no errors or complaints if I do this, but I assume Bakery is holding on to some old reference somewhere which still points to that old lightmap which results in the redundant old bake getting included.

Any chance of that being fixed? And do you need any additional info from myself?

 

Hi, I've just purchased Bakery and am running my first bake on a scene. Basically hit a hard limit with the built in lightmapper and it just crashes whenever I try and bake now.

However, prior to hitting this limit, Unity would bake my entire scene on Progressive GPU in under a minute, regardless of size. Bakery by comparison seems to be running extremely slowly, and the current bake has taken over 20 minutes. I did the optimal settings checker, put the Bakery scripts onto my lights and added the Sky light, and barely adjusted the default bake settings. I think I only changed the Texel count to 60.

Did I do something wrong, or am I having unrealistic expectations about the speed of Bakery? I feel like it should be barely slower than the built in one, if not faster. I'm using Unity 2019.4.31f1 and have a GTX 1660 Super graphics card.

EDIT: Also my scene only has like 8-10 lights in it, including the sun. So it's nothing crazy I don't think. It's not an enormous map, I'd say it's like 60x30 units, tops. The denoising in particular is taking a VERY long time.

 

There is a section in the project preferences for Bakery where you can set it to automatically delete previous lightmaps before rerendering them, have you tried that?

 

I just tried that and it broke everything. Even if you're baking individual sectors, if you enable this option and start a bake, it will delete ALL existing lightmaps, which is obviously not what you'd want.

I assume this is a bug @guycalledfrank as I can't imagine anyone wanting that when baking sectors.

 

So it seems that Bakery doesn't work with HDRP in anything around 2021.2 and 2021.3. Stuff still gets baked, but it's like there's zero bounce or indirect light. I used the Github Bakery updates.

I know the Asset Store page states that Bakery is only tested up to 2021.1.7, but I just wanted to give everyone a heads up.

 

Just a comment on this, because I did the math again: The laptop with the 3050ti 4GB costs about 600€ more. For that money, I can get a desktop 3060 with 12GB (400€) and a second hand TB3 eGPU case (200€). And I have no intention to do light baking on the train or sth. so I don't even care about portability. So, I dunno...

 

Then it's a no-brainer: I would pick that option hands down.
Also, if it's for baking, like I said before, the more important stats are: VRAM and being an RTX, so that 3060 has it all.

 

Also, look at this video before buying a desktop GPU:

 

Not to be pushy, but any info on this? I'm just not sure what a reasonable bake time looks like with Bakery, am I getting expected results with my hardware setup or is something wrong?

32 GB RAM

GTX 1660 Super

AMD Ryzen 7

10-30 minutes just seems really long compared to the mere minute it takes for Progressive GPU to bake the same scene, with higher settings. I can usually bake lights in Blender pretty quickly too.