POLL: How long does it take you to bake lighting (Baked GI) in your scene?

Hi!

I'm wondering how long it is taking you guys to "bake" your scenes as I have a $800 PC I built with Intel i7 4790 @3.6ghz (clocked to 3.7) and Nvidia 960, 8GB RAM and I've sat here for 8 hours and STILL haven't baked the scene.

I'm stuck at 5/11, Clustering 15 jobs (8 hours ago it was 24). I need to use baking to improve FPS for my Android game and I'm following this: http://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/GIIntro.html

So far the scene is pretty simple, but there are many lights and shadows which is probably what's slowing it down.

Any other ideas on how to bake faster and how to better optimize an Android game? Thanks!

 

That's weird. I was baking the lighting in my scene today which is a fairly complex and large scene and only took around 5 minutes. I've a core i7 4790k, 16gb Ram and an AMD HD7790 GPU. It shouldn't take longer than 30 minutes to do i believe.

On my previous system however, i remember when exporting my scene that it would get stuck on 5/11 clustering and it would not move ever. Some people suggested the terrain size was much too large and splitting it up into sections may fix the problem.

Sorry i couldn't help much, i'll try take a look around in the meantime.

 

Thanks, actually I don't have any terrain at all :/

 

The bake time will vary depending on your scene and the cache status. Unity 5 will first construct all the enlighten data (light transport paths, etc), cache them and then calculate the actual light based on them.

The first phase is the most time consuming, could easily cost you hours if you bake large scene on high quality. The light baking phase is actually pretty fast. Which means: If you don't change your scene geometry and only tweak the lighting, the rebaking is very fast. However, if you move a single box in your scene, it will likely take much longer time.

Our method is to bake with low-quality parameter when the scene is constantly changing. After it's somewhat finished, bake with high quality parameter.

 

I bake 1 piece of 2K lightmap with 200+ objects and it took me about 10mins on the 1st run and under 1mins on the next run and above. I didn't have a monster rig. Just an quite old machine. (5 years old I think.) More lighting setup (Point / Directional / Spot) will cause more longer to bake. In additional, I realized that area light will increase the bake time very much than other light types. Lastly shadow baking will also increase the bake time.