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Is there a way to estimate lightmap bake times?
I am working on a research project where I will be baking the lighting in a large number of scenes, and it is desirable to optimize this process as much as possible. I'm wondering if there is some way that I can estimate how long the bake time is going to be for each scene so that if the amount of time is unrealistic I can adjust settings or modify the scenes until the time is more manageable.
Good question... there are many potential factors to consider - if one had enough data I'm sure you could derive an approximate function based on number of lights, size of scene, shadow and quality settings etc. (and that, of course, would also be hardware-specific) but I'm not aware of it ever having been done.
I think the number of polygons and the resolution of your textures effect the bake times. Try using textures lower than 2048k. I am not a pro but at the moment I am baking with textures of 4096k with total of 1.5milion polygons and it takes at least 2 hours.