Which lightmapper?
Blitz3D Forums/Blitz3D Programming/Which lightmapper?
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| Hi. A friend outside our community has asked about lightmappers, specifically the possibility of using one with the output from seriously expensive CAD design software. Could as many people as possible please reply and tell me which lightmapper they use, reasons why, and which model formats you put through it? - In fact please add your model format of choice. Such as: Lightmapper: Slim Shady Reason: Because it's free. Format: X / 3DS / B3D (or whatever) I'd like to be able to compile a list so that the conclusion is 'our community primarily use such and such because of....' Thanks in advance. |
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| Gile[s] Excellent quality, fast renders http://www.frecle.net/giles/fileformats.htm I use .X, .LWO, ,B3D Demo available |
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| No question. Gile[s] is leagues ahead of everything else. Frankly, I prefer it to even 3dsMax because it's set up just the way you want a lightmapper to be, and the big 3d apps are always a little more fiddly. The render quality is exceptional. It's very, very flexible. I use ASE and B3D. |
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| Did anyone mention Gile[s] ? ;) I use Gile[s] because it's the best you can get for such a low price. I usually import .b3d into it. Another thing it is usefull for is arranging your levels, import rooms/doors add a player start pivot etc. |
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| Hiya John! We are assuming that your friend wants real-time useage, or static render useage. That would be useful to know. Also an idea of the number of polygons he needs because that would definately alter my answer. For low polygon count models OR breaking a huge model down into smaller parts I would use: Gile[s] Results are fantastic if you play with the settings and get to know the lighting well. Nothing comes for free! :) Products such as 3D Studio Max (which does fantastic rendered lighting) makes loads and loads and loads of extra textures when it lightmaps, so for real-time use it becomes to 'texture expensive'. BUT beware Gile[s] may not load very large models! You should do some tests first, also medium sized models with loads of textures will be slow. I have even known it to lock up completely under these circumstances. B3d exclusively for B3d stuff. Gile[s] copes with a great number of file formats, I know Fedbourg uses .ASE for some of his stuff, which may be useful for your CAD guy. What is great about Gile[s] is how easy it is to break down a large model and assign a number of different lightmaps of varying sizes to each of your models. If your friend needs a town lighting for example, you probably could not achieve that in Gile[s] (depending upon the polygon count and texture count), as one model... ...what you could do is break the town into smaller quadrants and light each of these separately. Because you can load a lights set up and merge stuff, you can slowly lightmap each quadrant with the same lights in place, adding details where you need it and turning shadows off where you can't see them. IPete2. |
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| ..well..my choice goes to 3DSMAX, and ASE, B3D,X |
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| Brilliant response. Thanks. IPete2, glad it was you and not me who mentioned the lockup problems with Giles, but thanks for also offering an alternate solution. Everyone else, please keep the responses coming. I'd like to build up as big a picture as possible of what we (at the cutting edge, he-he) are using, for the dinosaurs. |
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| John Apart from Max (which I don't have), there's bugger all else to choose from apart from Giles. There's Lightmap Maker from windsoft.com, but it's interface is particularly unfriendly. Cartography Shop has a built in LM. Last time I looked, it did the job, but would not lightmap imported non-cs created geometry (this might have changed by now) There's various amateur freeware blitz produced LM's, but they all have problems. Insight concepts was producing a LM called Luminescence3d which gave excellent results with minimal tweaking, however they seem to have discontinued development. As for Giles, everyone raves about it, but I find it needs a lot of tweaking to get an acceptable render and it seems prone to artifacting when LM'ing my Lightwave generated geometry. I suspect this is because it likes nice regular output from editors such as Cart Shop, rather than the polygon soup from LW. However it does offer good control over group/surface LM settings and it's been wriiten with a view to Blitz integration. |
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| I like 3dsmax best of all, but Giles is an amazing tool and the only alternative I'd consider. Max has a lot of extra set up time, but thats made easier if you use a script lightmap tool like Bakersfield, which lets you set up scene nodes, afterwhich you simply pick your nodes from a list and click render to create new lightmaps. The advantage of something like 3dsmax is that you can render tiny thumbnails that give you an impression of what your lightmaps will look like in very short notice. The problesm with it is that you need a thorough understanding of the lighting tools and max render which is far more complex having been designed for pre rendered film and video production. Also for best results you will have to play around with the mapping a fair ammount yourself in order to avoid thin black outlined on edges. Also, to map large scenes efficiently in blitz, you are better off combining a series of models into one and mapping and lightmapping them together as a single entity and seperating it after as needed. Works great, but is a lot of extra work that makes more sense to do at the end for final polish. The beauty of giles lies in its simplicity of setup, and the fact that it car render a single ligtmap over a variety of seperate meshes without any fiddle that you would find elsewhere. It also does a better job of auto UVmapping, allthough I still find I prefer to arrange my maps by hand at the end of the day. I love B3dpipeline, and find that adding more intermediate tools gets in the way of other parts of my workflow and level design. But if it wasn't for pipeline and 3dsmax, I'd see no alternative but Giles. And I'd probably use Giles for simpler time critical tasks simply because of how quick and efficient it is, and easy for a newbie to learn without losing power for more advanced users. |
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| Really comprehensive replies! Thanks everyone. @Evak: "you are better off combining a series of models into one and mapping and lightmapping them together as a single entity and seperating it after as needed." - Isn't that just the opposite of what IPete2 was recommending, or an I misunderstanding? For a little while longer, please anyone who wants to add to this thread please do so. Every comment helps to build up a picture. And just in case anyone's wondering, no, I'm not about to write a lightmapper (I wish I could). |
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