I have a 8gb ram computer and I’m trying to build the lightening for my game and it’s taking forever to build. Please how do I fix this?
Hi, that depends on many additional things, hardware side: your RAM speed, CPU, memory centre and software side: your operating system. lighting settings and especially the size of your project. It would be difficult to find an exact figure but building your lighting is a CPU intensive process which requires a lot of memory. 8GB of memory, and I’m assuming you have a quad core processor, is minimum recommended specification. It probably will take a very long time to build in any case unfortunately. The crashes would suggest you are running out of memory which means you have reached the maximum amount of unbuilt lighting your 8GB of RAM can handle. You could speed up your build by optimising your light-map resolutions and general lighting. It is very likely you have these settings set higher than you need but if you want the extra resolution you have to wait for it. Ultimately, if you are working on large projects, I would recommend investing in a more powerful computer. The increased performance will make a huge difference on your build times.
Okay, but how do I optimising my light-map resolutions and general lighting? And if you have any tips and tricks on how to increase the build speed please kindly share.
There is a lot to cover with regards to optimising lighting and build times:
First I would recommend you look at your lightmass settings. There are a lot of settings you can tweak to significantly improve your build times and it is covered in detail in the Unreal Engine documentation I have linked below. At the end of the documentation there’s a long section on getting the best lighting build times
Documentation:
The next best thing to do is add a Lightmass Importance Volume if you don’t have one already. You probably have many meshes at the edge of your world that do not need high quality lighting. Lightmass will emit photons for those meshes, so the larger your levels the higher your build times unless you use a Lightmass Importance Volume. The Lightmass Importance Volume controls the area that Lightmass emits photons by lowering the lighting quality outside the volume and improving your build times. You can play around with the volume until you have the best build performance without compromising your visual aesthetics.
Documentation:
I would also recommend you watch the Lighting with Unreal Engine Masterclass:
Or here is a summary of the Masterclass:
Another good video on lighting optimisation with a focus on light mobility:
Thanks, I’ll check them out. I also figured that by increase the priority of the exe program called “unreal lightmass”, build time can be faster.