Unity Noob with Lighting Questions

Hello Unity Gurus

I am working on a game, targeting latest mobile hardwares. I have started using Unity 5 since last month. I am familiar with how UE4 functions, but I am in the process of getting a good grasp of how Unity 5 functions.

I apologise in advance if this question has been asked already in which case I would highly appreciate if you can point to the thread.

I have a small scene setup. I have one main Directional with 1.2 intensity and 2 fill directional with no shadows at 0.1 intensity.

What I am very curious about is the baking time involved. When I bake the scene @ Very low resolution it takes about 7-10 minutes. But when I switch to even Low Resolution settings it take 20 minutes or more. Since I am new to the engine I would appreciate if anyone can tell me if this is normal or if I am setting up something wrong.

Here is the screen cap of Lightmap setting and stats of geometry getting baked (which I got from Maya)

 

For me I baked a 2kmx2km terrain, trees, rocks in about 45 minutes. That was with a non-directional (the simplest) light map at a resolution of 2 texels per unit and the Very Low setting and an atlas size of 1024. Maybe it's because it's a big scene (im not sure how big yours is). The baking so far is quite a lot slower than it was in Unity 4. But the speed of lightmapping has increased in the last few builds.

 

Thank you very much for the reply. Going by your stats im probably not far off. I was going by baking time in UE4 which are very fast and made me doubt my settings in Unity.

My scene is roughly 600m x 400m. Its only a blockout, with about 15 hard surfaced objects. I am sorry that I cant post screenshots because of confidentiality.

Looking at your settings, I guess I can change the texels per unit to 2 for iterative purposes and see if speeds up things.

I would appreciate if anyone else in the forum can add more insight into lightbake times.

Also along the same lines, given that light baking takes time, is there a technique to do Bake selected in Unity 5.

Thanks

 

cool. btw i used 1 texel per unit - the 2 was a typo - i rendered it again using 2 texels to see if it doubled the lightmap size (it did) so i knew i was on the right track. I didn't time the bake with the higher texel count, but my instinct feels like it wasnt double the time.

 

This looks amazing. Thank you for the screenshot and texel correction. I am going to check out your game now

 

Okay I got one more question. Is there a log somewhere for light bake time.