koobas.hobune.stream
Managing lightmaps in a larger project?
Something that is plaguing iteration time on our team in Unity is the processing of lightmaps, so I'm just looking for a sanity check to make sure we're not wasting time when we don't have to.
Anytime our level artist bakes a new lightmap and commits the .exr to SVN, each developer has to sit there waiting for Unity to process the new lightmap file when they update. It seems like in a perfect world whatever it's doing should be saved out to that file's .meta file or something so that work wouldn't have to be duplicated. Is this one of those "that's just how it is", or is there something we can do to improve our workflow?
Thanks in advance.
Large assets can be a workflow problem for $$anonymous$$ms, especially if they're updated fairly often.
The cache server is part of the Team License, and is intended to help some with that issue. Ins$$anonymous$$d of requiring each user to fully re-import, the server will cache recent version(s) of each asset. For a big enough project, the download is almost always quite a bit faster than a full reimport.
You could also try a revised workflow that has your $$anonymous$$ms working in separate projects, which you keep in sync using some mix of branching, submodules, Unity package import/export, and so on. Heavyweight changes made by one $$anonymous$$m (or user) will only affect other users on that particular repo. This introduces other problems, of course, but it's sometimes better than letting your $$anonymous$$ms stomp on each other with long wait times.
Thanks, I appreciate the response. The revised workflow is pretty out of the question at this point in production but the cache server is something we could probably fairly easily set up. Our individual levels aren't that big, but I would still wager that our in house servers could stream it faster than Unity takes to re-import everything :)
