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Continuous Baking?

Discussion in 'General Graphics' started by topofsteel, Mar 14, 2015.

  1. topofsteel

    topofsteel

    Joined:
    Dec 2, 2011
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    999
    What is the idea behind this really? Is it intended for tiny little projects with one light and one room? I work on large projects, in 4.x I would adjust lights in an area and bake selected. So now I have to have separate scenes set up just to check lighting as I make adjustments.
    I thought I might be missing something, so I went ahead and checked it and let it process. I was hoping it would use the cache and only update something I changed, in some way replicating the bake selected workflow. No, I change one light and it begins the 2 hour process over again. Are you kidding me?
    I happend to build a player with it checked and it did a lot of work with baked data this or that. My player completed ok, but my scene was left without any of the lightmaps applied.
     
    Last edited: Mar 15, 2015
    topofsteel, Mar 14, 2015
    #1

  2. KEngelstoft

    KEngelstoft

    Unity Technologies

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    Continuous Baking is intended to be used when you are iterating on the lighting. If you keep moving objects, the precompute will have to be redone and that takes time, but once you are in the phase where you are just tweaking lighting you can get fast feedback, especially when using Realtime GI.
    If you set everything to baked, bake times can't be avoided ofc. but since we cache the intermediate stages you will still get a faster turnaround time because we can load some of the data from the GI cache.

    You problem with the build of your scene sounds like a bug and it would be great if you could report it.
     
    KEngelstoft, Mar 18, 2015
    #2
    johnbeyer likes this.

  3. topofsteel

    topofsteel

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    Thanks, I was irritated when I typed that out, never a good thing, I apologize. This first project i'm doing is big, so it's difficult to see the caching benefits. I'll need to set up a medium sized test scene. In the small tests I did, the first bake took a bit, but each successive bake was much faster.
     
    topofsteel, Mar 18, 2015
    #3

  4. KEngelstoft

    KEngelstoft

    Unity Technologies

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    You should consider increasing the cache size in Preferences -> GI Cache if your scene is so large that files are purged from it all the time and you get rebaking instead of fast reloading from cache.
     
    KEngelstoft, Mar 19, 2015
    #4