When I build lighting, it gets stuck at Exporting Lighting 100%

I have a large map. It has a load of grass, terrain, and some trees. And whenever I try to build the lighting it gets stuck at Exporting 100%. On Swarm, its like the exporting bar goes on forever, without stopping.

I’ve tried: Setting swarm to standalone mode, setting static lighting level scale to 4, setting unreal editor to low affinity priority, setting swarm to high affinity priority, and setting local instructions to normal priority on Swarm.

None of these have worked so far.

Here’s my build:

  • i7 6700k OC 4.6GHz
  • GTX 1080
  • 16GB RAM

Any ideas as to what could be causing this? Thanks!

I’m probably not going to be the one to answer this but I may be able to help someone else narrow it down. My first thought: is the CPU still churning away but nothing happens, or is the CPU idle? Also, how long have you let it run before giving up?

The CPU isnt doing much while it’s happening. It’s at about 30% load or somewhere around that.

I’ve let it run for at least ten minutes before giving up. :confused:

Seems like you need to build large worlds in chunks. Did you see this? How does one build lighting for massive worlds? - Rendering - Epic Developer Community Forums

Try building the lighting with one of the template projects. If that works then we know it’s not completely broken. It’s worth mentioning though that large worlds is as advanced as UE4 gets so it’s not the best point of entry into working with the engine.

Nope. I don’t understand most of the posts, though. I’m new to this sort of thing, and at the moment I’m just messing with the engine. I’m not aiming for a full-on game just yet. :stuck_out_tongue:

I should also note that my RAM stops filling up at about 9 or 10 gigabytes, which I think means it it’s fully exported, but it isn’t processing.

It works fine on the first person template, so it’s just my game. Is it worth noting I based the entire map off of the third person template?

Hopefully there will be others who can help you better but as I see it you have three options:

First, you can add more machines to distribute the load of the baking process. Swarm, with some setup, can do that, The problem for most is that we can’t afford lots of machines. Most large world games are made by companies that can afford farms of machines to do this sort of processing.

Second, from what I read in the link I gave in my comment, it seems you can bake your map in stages. You disable parts of your map and bake with what is visible. Then you disable what you baked and enable some of the parts that didn’t get baked yet, and then you bake again. Apparently it’s cumulative so you won’t be overwriting previous bakes. It may be more involved than I am aware but the link I gave should be a good starting point if this is the way you choose to go.

Third, and perhaps least desirable, is the option to simply work with smaller maps that your machine can handle. It’s not such a bad option IMHO because dealing with large worlds is fairly advanced. I have to say that I’ve been furiously learning and developing with UE4 for a year or so and I’m just getting into working with large worlds.

I don’t think so. Let me get this straight: you’re new to UE4 but you got terrain and foliage into the third person template project? That’s pretty impressive. We could go on with more questions like how big is your map and such but I think it’s pretty clear that baking your current map will take more than clicking Build. The link I gave describes two options, which I will put in an answer, along with the third option I see.

Maybe working with smaller worlds would be best for me. I’m only a kid who’s about to do their GCSE exams messing with game dev tools, so I don’t exactly have a farm of PCs in my garage. :stuck_out_tongue: And the second thing seems really complicated to me. I learnt what I currently know just by searching what I wanted to do and it came up with things, like free assets and stuff.

Thanks for the help, though!

Yeah. That second option seems to require using sub-levels. Best of luck. Check out all the tutorials on the Unreal site as well as on YouTube. Maybe some day you can help me out with a problem. :slight_smile: