Is LightmapSnapshot.asset in Unity 5 the same as Unity 4's LightProbes.asset?

I suspect it is. My issue with the Unity 5 project I have is that the on demand baked light probes are 450MB+ and this exceeds GitHub's 100MB file size limit.

So now of course I need to reduce this asset size. I'm suspecting that if this asset is the result of baking light probes that less light probes will reduce the size of the asset.

1) Any other ways to reduce the size of the LightmapSnapshot.asset in Unity 5?

2) Is 450MB+ normal for this file? There are just over 950 light probes in the single light probe group that is baked. So that's nearly 0.5MB of data per light probe. If this isn't expected behavior I'll try to reduce down to a project that I can report via Bug Reporter / FogBugz.

Cheers.

 

I think it also includes the actual lighting/lightmaps as well now, that's why the size went up that much.

 

No concerns about the potential size of the file w.r.t. source code control systems receiving it?

 

Seems like adding it to your .gitignore might be a good idea, even if it were uploadable to github, it's undesirable to have a file like that bloating up your git repo.

 

Agreed! Which is why the folders '/Library' and '/Temp' for example are useful to have in .gitignore.

GitHub's provided .gitignore for Unity projects is currently,

[Ll]ibrary/
[Tt]emp/
[Oo]bj/
[Bb]uild/

# Autogenerated VS/MD solution and project files
/*.csproj
/*.unityproj
/*.sln
/*.suo
/*.user
/*.userprefs
/*.pidb
/*.booproj

# Unity3D Generated File On Crash Reports
sysinfo.txt​

So my questions is if this file is to remain as a large conglomeration of light-map data,

Can it be quickly regenerated if not found inside of the project sub-directory? I suspect not as whilst there are still individual lightmap files of atlas size, there is no individual probes asset like in Unity 4. This LightmapSnapshot.asset file would be in the Scene assets sub-directory and not found there if a team member cloned down the Git project form the remote repository and the .asset had been Git ignored.

If it can somehow be quickly regenerated from asset data then arguably it should be in /Library and not /Assets.

 

Yes whether it's safe to actually put in a .gitignore and whether it will rebuild itself is an important consideration.

If it's something that's going to change often, is binary, and is that large it will bloat up a git repo to huge in a very short span of time.




My .gitignore is a bit bigger and I find it works very well. I found it online somewhere described as "the best .gitignore for Unity" and it's much more comprehensive than the one github provides.

 

@Jesper Mortensen thanks for the update. Very informative. Cheers!

 

Is the GI runtime data in LightmapSnapshot.asset less 'bloated' for RC1? I noticed that in Beta 22 it's still a healthily large size.

Given that it's the data for updating GI at runtime I'm assuming it's important to version control. Unfortunately the size is such currently that this isn't possible using a source control remote like GitHub.

 

@superpig unfortunate but workable. Sure these kind of generated files don't need to be versioned, but there's a convenience and time savings not to have to re-bake if they are clone-able from a remote copy. If in future versions of Unity 5 something could be done to reduce the size of the GI realtime data that would be swell.

Currently for one of my scenes the baked GI data at 15 texel resolution generates 200Mb of baked data split over 14 2048x2048 EXR files (light and direction). The corresponding realtime GI data at 2 texel resolution (this could be lowered for the scene I'm sure) generates 900Mb of data in 1 monolithic asset. Perhaps as @Jesper Mortensen says this may in future builds be reduced by a platform dependent data split and/or compression. Lossless compression (ZIP) on the realtime GI data gave a 14% reduction on the 900Mb file. Different layout or data format of the realtime GI may get more reduction.