Advanced High Quality Lightmapping

[FireScythe]

You need to increase the padding value when you render to texture so that when the image is scaled up/down the black background doesnt seep in.

[Scooby Doo]

show us self illum or gtfo!

just kidding. this will come in handy tho. great work, mate.

~Scoob

[DEElekgolo]

Gah. Ill do the illum tut after my finals. That would be in a week or two.

[p0lar_bear]

Yeah, I was going to say that using max for lightmapping isn't a great idea if you have lighted interiors for your map.

I've long wondered how to get materials to emit light.

[DaneO'Roo]

Now that's the shit right there son.

[Reaper Man]

Uh, didn't Jahrain post a tutorial on how to do this a year or two ago? Plus, I've been mentioning it regularly. Oh well, glad to see it's resurfaced.

[DaneO'Roo]

Nah this is a much better less annoying version.


Also, theoretically, if you uv mapped 2 channels instead of 1 for your bsp and gave the extra one normal maps and full materials, like your terrain and what not, you could render displacement baked into the lightmaps, but I'm not sure on that. Could be a way to get all the bumps in the level to look lit rather than having to flashlight them or put a dynamic light near them. You may even be able to do it without a seperate uv channel, I'm not sure.

IF so, you could zbrush or mudbox just your terrain, project render it as normals to your bsp terrain models uvws and apply it to your scene where the ground map material is located. Basically fake some sexy rocky shit happening on the cliffs and what not.

[FireScythe]

Yeah, I was going to say that using max for lightmapping isn't a great idea if you have lighted interiors for your map.

I've long wondered how to get materials to emit light.

The only method I know of is using the Advanced Lighting Override material with scanline and radiosity. Replace the emissive material with this, whack up the luminance scale (I usually put it around 150 for starters) and set the self illumination to a colour.
http://www.kxcad.net/autodesk/3ds_ma..._material.html

[Scooby Doo]

i like your thoughts, dano. i bet the bumps could be achieved by messing with the materials in max. i mean, instead of a fully white material, you do something else like add a bump map, reflection properties, illum maps, etc. i guess if we experiment with it, we'll find out

but, DEE did say that self illum had something to do with max materials i think. but we have to wait for his tut...


~Scoob

[DEElekgolo]

Actually. You may use things like omni and so on. But vray has the best self illumination method I have seen.

And even bitmap based lighting.