lightmapper question?
Community Forums/Developer Stations/lightmapper question?
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| I'm looking for a good lightmapper capable of generating...you guessed it, light-maps. Particularly shadows. I need it to be FREE, and efficient. Slim-shade or whatever is nice, but it will take FOREVER to generate a lightmap and usually will crash during the creation of a lightmap. gile(s) is too expensive, and lightbulb is nonexhistant. Any suggestions are appreciated :D |
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| You could try Lightmap Maker, heres some info about it http://www.awingsoft.com/help/index.htm and heres the download link http://www.awingsoft.com/zips/lmmaker039.exe, it produces some good results but its quite difficult to position lights. |
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| Some say that the lightmap maker has spyware. Watch out! |
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| So you look for a professional app offered for free ... not very realistic. At best you just restructure your level setup in a way to make it really usable to slim-shade (smaller surfaces and the like) or rewrite slim-shade to your needs. |
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| ..I'm not going to spoil thread, but I dont think so that GILES with all his features can be described as a expensive program... |
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| No, I agree with with Naughty Alien. I'm looking into buying the (stable) release of 2.0 |
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| Giles 2 ( http://www.frecle.net/index.php ) seem pretty good, but for perfect lightmaps you need to take some time and adjust a ton of settings. It“s one of the very few solution that supports adaption of smoothing in lightmaps. Not for free. Slimshady cannot handle alpha and masked textures, makes it useless for me. (Tho I still use the nonpublic version 0.5 to position and merge meshes, then export with lights for giles import). http://www.melog.ch/slimshady/ lmmaker039.exe (mentioned in an earlier posting) is recognized as malware by Antivir, not sure if it“s really dangerous, but I wouldn't run it. Maplet (from Blitzresearch) has excellent lightmaps, but cannot import meshes and is limited to the primitives of the CSG modeller (no spheres, cones etc. one way export path) Any fullfledged 3D modeller like Blender may be able to do lightmaps, you only need to work out a converter path to B3D. That said, blender has a hard learning curve. http://lf.mmdevel.de/lf/documentation/lightmaptutorial/Blender2Lightfeather.html There's DeleD ( http://www.delgine.com/ ) , that contains a lightmapper as well, although some people say it was "inadequate", but decide for yourself. Then there“s FSRad, not tried yet, but looking promising: orig: http://www.paulnettle.com/pub/FluidStudios/Radiosity/FSRad-004.zip (some say not easy to use, no smoothing as giles) (orge mod:) http://www.horza.de/OgreFSRad.shtml#overview (other modded version:) http://www.geocities.com/dxlab/tmp/fsrad.html Then threre“s IrrEdit, very promising. Allows to import a lot of formats, but lacks of useful export formats, maybe somebody“s gonna write a B3D export plugin? : http://www.ambiera.com/irredit/features.html then there“s NVIDIA“s gelato, can be used to lightmap,tho probably only on NVIDIA GPUs http://blogs.nvidia.com/gelato/2007/01/gelato_21_candi.html as discussed here: http://www.ogre3d.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=186633&sid=ce193664e1d3d7c4af509e6f4e2718c6 Then there's 3delight: http://www.3delight.com/index.htm also discussed in the mentioned forum thread. Then there“s kerkythea: http://www.kerkythea.net/joomla/ Excellent radiosity, tho not sure if it can export anything at all. Then there“s halos/leadwerks 3D world studio. not for free. http://www.leadwerks.com/ Then there“s nitrogen (promising!!) http://www.nitrogen.za.org/projectinfo.asp?id=18 Then there's "World", made for the DBPro ppl, but may be useful too: http://world.mapmasterz.com/ lightbulb has vanished, as well as the several releases of elas_t, where Phosphore featured radiosity, but he had to stop working on it for the sake of his medical study - good for our health, bad for our toolpark. Other than that, I'd try to google, maybe there' something new around. |
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