Generate lightning not generating

[misty veldt]

So I have been trying to generate lightning for my new scene and it just won't. Estimated time is goin up and there's no progress. Any ideas?

looks like global illumination is not working anywere in the project so I just can't generate it

it might be something in settings but idk what

[dreamy ivy]

You can reduce the resolution to reduce the time it takes but it's pretty normal for light baking to take hours or even days

Also the GPU lightmapper is faster but you'll need enough VRAM to use it

[misty veldt]

its not the case I tried just now. I have many static objects tho but is it a problem?

[dreamy ivy]

There's a debugging mode where you can see the density of the lightmaps. Sometimes objects have insane lightmap resolutions by default

Although if your level is larger than a square kilometer I'd recommend just going for real-time lighting because baking becomes pretty infeasible at that point 😅

[misty veldt]

well

[misty veldt]

so how do I check what resolution is my lightmap?

bc in debug mode I dont see one

is it this?

and yeah I have really big scenes

[dreamy ivy]

No it's one of the debug views of the scene mode

But if your scene is big enough then lightmapping becomes unviable altogether and you really should look into real-time lighting

[misty veldt]

ok, so I just generated lightmaps and theyre 2048x2048 so its not that bad I think

but it looks bad so I will switch to realtime lights

hope the game will be playable

[quick spire]

How big and complex is the scene, and do you also have Realtime GI enabled above Baked GI

Realtime GI is another type of lightmapping that's really slow to generate in big scenes

GPU baking is typically 10 or more times faster than CPU baking, if you have a decent GPU

[dreamy ivy]

Yeah the "realtime GI" is Enlighten, some old version from 2014 I think

[quick spire]

Maybe not that much slower than CPU baked GI, but it's twice the work and has different pain points for bake performance

[dusty venture]

@misty veldt which version are you on? Definitely turn off 'progressive updates', try to use the GPU Lightmapper and use Unity 6+ if possible.

[misty veldt]

well Im on 2022.3.38f1

[dusty venture]

light baking is fundamentally different in 2022 compared to 6

[misty veldt]

well I gave up on baking lights anyway bc my gtx 1660 is not going to make it out alive if I bake light in every scene for 2 days 😆

Im just using realtime and its good

[dusty venture]

another happy customer

[quick spire]

There's a bunch of things you can do to optimize a scene for baking
(And a bunch of things you can neglect to make it take forever)
Typically excluding small and complex meshes from being lightmapped, or from contributing to GI at all
Bake resolution and samples also matter
In this case if you still want to try you'd start by baking an empty scene with just one cube and one light

And don't bake Realtime GI at the same time as mentioned