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Cut Your Build Time in Half with Incremental Baking

May 31, 2025

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Cut Your Build Time in Half with Incremental Baking

Full rebuilds for lighting, occlusion, and navigation meshes can stretch build times to 30+ minutes. Incremental baking updates only changed assets—often slashing build times by over 50%. In this Quick Win, you’ll learn a 3-step guide for Unity and Unreal, see a script snippet to auto-detect modified files, and review benchmarks before/after. Plus, find related video tutorials to dive deeper.

⚙️ Quick Win: 3-Step Guide

  1. 🛠️ Detect Changes: Use a version control diff or fswatch to list modified scenes/assets.
  2. 🛠️ Trigger Incremental Bake: Invoke Unity’s –incrementalLightmapMode or Unreal’s -build -incremental flags.
  3. 🛠️ Deploy Artifacts: Copy only updated LOD, lightmap, and navmesh files back to your build directory.

▶️ For a demo of Unity’s incremental lightmap baking, see this YouTube tutorial.

▶️ For Unreal Engine incremental builds, check out this walkthrough.

💻 Script Snippet: Auto-Detect Changed Assets

Rather than embedding the full script here, view and copy the latest version directly from our GitHub Gist:

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📈 Benchmarks: Before vs. After

  • 🔍 Full Build: 28 min → Incremental: 12 min (57% reduction)
  • 🔍 Lightmap Only: 10 min → 3 min (70% reduction)
  • 🔍 Navmesh Only: 6 min → 2.5 min (58% reduction)
  • 🔍 Average CPU Usage: 95% → 45%

⭐ AGL Rating

  • ⏱️ Time Saved (8/10): Halves build time on average, though initial setup adds ~1hr.
  • ⚙️ Ease of Setup (7/10): Simple scripts and engine flags, but requires CI integration.
  • 💰 Cost Benefit (9/10): Near-zero licensing cost, huge time ROI for teams of any size.

💼 Work Opportunities of the Day

  • 🔍 Build Tools Engineer @ Unity – Craft and optimize Unity’s baking pipeline. Advice: Highlight your scripting and CI/CD experience on your resume. Apply here.
  • 🔍 Cloud DevOps @ Epic Games – Scale Unreal build servers for studio pipelines. Advice: Showcase your Terraform and Kubernetes projects in your portfolio. Apply here.

🛠️ Tip of the Day

🔧 Use file hashes rather than timestamps to detect truly modified assets and avoid unnecessary bakes.

Have you tried incremental baking in your pipeline? Share your setup on our Discord and let’s compare notes. © 2025 AI Game Lab

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