That little progress bar that sits down the bottom right of the editor

Down in the bottom right-hand corner of Unity 5 is a little progress bar that looks something like this:



I've noticed a few steps on this bar, all of which seem to take quite a while to process, such as "Layout generation" (or words to that effect), "Clustering", and "Visibility", however there doesn't seem to be any context for what the editor's actually doing on each of these stages, nor and clue as to how much more is left to run or how long it will take.

Is there any chance of a "Background processes" window like the one in Final Cut which lists what's in the queue and what's left to do? Failing that, has anyone got any context for what the 11 stages are, what the editor is actually doing at each stage, and what you can do to speed the whole thing up? After installing RC2, the Editor re-imported everything in my scene and it's been sitting for over 2 hours now and it's only got to 1257 jobs on 6/11 Visibility (5/11 Clustering, whatever that means, took about an hour to finish).

I'm guessing this is all related somehow to the new Global Illumination features of Enlighten, but as I mentioned above it would be useful to know what it's actually doing.

 

I would also like to know what each stage means, that way one can have better idea of how to setup some tests and what might be taking so long in the scene.

So then you can switch off anything unnecessary that may drive test times up, and only switch it back on when you do a final bake/process.

 

That's your lightmap baking bar. If you want to you can turn it off by disabling "continuous baking" and then only bake when you're ready to bake. I prefer this method since the continuous baking seems to take up a lot of system resources. It can be disabled in the Lighting tab.

 

I realise that, and I have already got it disabled (I've been driving NCarter mad in freenode/#unity3d ). What I want to know is what it actually means, why I have thousands of jobs to be processed, what those jobs are, and how to speed up the process as there is no context for any of it whatsoever and the process currently takes hours to complete. :/

 

Incidentally, this lighting build has been running since 9.30pm, it had been running for nearly two hours when I made that post at 11:20, and it's now 02:47 and it's been sitting on the Bake AO stage since about 00:30. >.< So, you can understand how I could be interested in learning what I can do to speed up this process, because waiting 5 hours to see the results every time I change an emissive texture is ridiculous. >.<

 

At least yours finishes.

 

I've only seen it finish once, and that was in a scene I have decided to call Planesphere: The Game. xD

 

Personally first while setting up my level I first disable baked GI and experiment with realtime GI, so that I have to bake only once for light transport and then I can change/add lights, emissive textures, etc. Once I have everything finalized, then only do I bake. Mostly I don't even bake, I just use Realtime GI since in most of my levels I have day-night cycles or multiple lights which are turned on-off at runtime.