Baking lighting stuck on 'Waiting for Shaders to compile' | Voters

Baking lighting stuck on 'Waiting for Shaders to compile'

available in future release

turtledude01

The last SDK version I was able to successfully test was 3.8.1.  This one allows for lighting to bake successfully
On latest SDK 3.8.2 (And 3.8.2-beta.1):
'Generate Lighting' with unity built in lighting menu
-> Background task stuck "Waiting for shaders to compile" - The time to completion continuously rises and never moves past 5%
I am using an AMD rx 5700xt, screenshot attached is from another user who has the same issue and is using NVidia.

July 2, 2025

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available in future release

Tupper - VRChat Head of Community

marked this post as

needs more information

We're unable to replicate. Please provide more details, if possible!

owlboy

Tupper - VRChat Head of Community It looks like you guys figured it out? It seemed like we gave all the relevant info! And orels confirmed they could see the issue.

Tupper - VRChat Head of Community

owlboy: Yep, Orels noted they had found a solution for this when I updated the ticket and was able to get it moving. Status was updated automatically

owlboy

Tupper - VRChat Head of Community Thanks! The new update works for me!

Floober

Had this issue on the latest world sdk beta, reverting to 3.8.1 did the trick.

In another project I was able to work around it be switching my mats from standard lite to unity standard for the bake, at least seems to be an issue with just the vrc shaders. This was on an amd gpu.

MisutaaAsriel

Still a problem a month later. Hopefully a new SDK drops soon with a fix. :o

TenshiK

I was going round in circles for over an hour thinking I had broken something! Thank you for this. Downgrading to 3.8.1 let me bake my lighting. :)

Matrices

I had to downgrade to 3.8.1 to bake my lighting.

W i l k

OMG, I thought I was going crazy. This also caused Bakery to hang forever trying to bake occlusion probes using Unity's built in renderer.
I don't know whether Magic Light Probes failing to calculate light volumes is also related to this.
But Downgrading to 3.8.1 solved the issue

orels

Thanks for all the details, everyone ❤️

We have found the root cause and going to investigate the potential solutions

turtledude01

orels Through more testing I was able to narrow this down to the VRChat/Mobile/Standard Lite shader.

Specifically an object with 'Specular Anti-Aliasing' enabled on the Standard Lite shader. As soon as I disable this option baking works normally.

Edit: Able to 100% reproduce in a fresh project via the following steps:

New project, put the Standard lite shader on the floor
Configure the Mesh Renderer to enable 'Contribute Global Illumination'
Ensure 'Specular Anti-Aliasing' is enabled on the shader
Attempt to bake.

owlboy

orels I can confirm that these settings are present in the scene where I reproduced the issue too.

FunnyLeos

Same problem. Large project, couldn't bake light on 3.8.2

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