level & lightmap
Blitz3D Forums/Blitz3D Programming/level & lightmap
| ||
| actually it is easy to create level including lightmap in 3DSMax 5: 1. create level mesh 2. texture it 3. hit '0' - render on texture 4. export it into B3D format using B3D pipeline (somewhere in the forum) |
| ||
| It's easy, but it's not particularly effective. Max is considerably more wasteful with UV mapping space than Maplet, YAL or Cartography Shop. |
| ||
| True, and with MAX you dont get the added benifits of being able to use tiling on the original texture (because the render to texture is a complete bake, where it bakes the lightmapping and the original texture to one texture) Best thing to do is to use YAL to lightmap it, and write your own exporter to b3d. |
| ||
| Well thats half true dark half :) You could just render the actual lightmap to a texture and not the whole thing, then using multitexturing load it like any other lightmap. |
| ||
| You can use tiling on the original texture - just render a shadowmap instead of complete texture. In my experience, Max5's automatic UV mapping is pretty efficient. Personally, I think the benefits of letting the artist use a very powerful tool that they're already comfortable with far outweigh the drawbacks. It's the reason a lot of game companies are starting to integrate their level design tools into 3dsMax (they address the efficiency problem by taking advantage of Max features like instancing and grouping to define regions - features that I'm planning on supporting in B3d Pipeline :) ) Sure a level made in Maplet might be terribly, super-duper efficient, but that only half of the problem... -Pudding |
| ||
| Well thats half true dark half :) So how do you get the 2nd uv set (data) from max to b3d? You could just render the actual lightmap to a texture and not the whole thing, then using multitexturing load it like any other lightmap. |
| ||
| I totally agree with pudding, this is definitley the way to go for artist at least.The added bonus with max is that you can manually rearrange the uv's if they are not to your liking. I have been using the free luminaire plugin which also renders to texture, but with better results. Also you can lightmap players/bots , which also looks quite nice. One thing though, pudding some companies are trying to develop their own tools because max is becoming inreasingly expensive , they are planning on charging for renewal of licence on a per yearly basis, which stinks in my opinion |
| ||
| is it something to do with speed issue? - which one render a lot faster in real-time (assuming the same level polys)... |
| ||
| b3d pipeline lets you assign a second uv channel via max.Then it is automatically assigned when you load your model |
| ||
| so after all this B3D pipeline been done - the best tools to do 'everything' is Max right? u know, modelling, texturing, animating n level design... btw - what the best tools (devices) to create motion capture in order to xport it within CS? (*.csm, *.bip format?) |
| ||
| Well it is in my opinion and most of the industry use it too . The b3d pipeline makes milkshape more or less redundant, unless you happen to use it as your main program. Sorry , don't know much about mo cap. |
   |