[Bf-funboard] Lightmaps and Render Baking

Alexander Ewering blender at instinctive.de
Wed Jan 10 15:18:40 CET 2007


On Wed, 10 Jan 2007, Matt Ebb wrote:

> Argh, sorry to double-post, but I want to retract that, "a real mess" is too 
> strong a phrase, because the feature does work reasonably well. It would 
> really benefit from a cleaner workflow though, with more of the repetitive 
> drudge work done by the computer, not forced on the artist.

It kind of reminds me of radiosity, which is a similar mess to apply to a
game scene.

The additional problem here is that the scene gets subdivided into a zillion
faces, which slows down collision detection considerably.

So, in instinctive-blender, I've made the following automation (single
button press after calculating radiosity):

- "Add New Meshes"
- Radiosity meshes get their collision flags cleared
- "Remove doubles" on the radiosity meshes
- "Split loose parts" on the radiosity meshes - to help frustum culling
- Set old meshes' faces to 'invisible' (so the (simpler) old meshes now only
   serve collision detection)
- Set old meshes' drawmode to "Wire" (so they will only be shown as "ghosts"
   in the editor no matter what view drawmode)

So, with mostly a single keypress, you can take your radiosity solution
right into the game, with an optimized result.

Something similar should be done for lightmaps... it must really be a "one
click and forget" solution.

Click button, and get:

- Automatically assign empty images to all meshes in the scene, on an
   automatically created new UV layer, with reasonably chosen resolution
   based on surface area
- If there is already such a "lightmap" layer (could get a flag), delete it
- Render to only this layer, leaving the others (textures) untouched
- P, and enjoy.

| alexander ewering              instinctive mediaworks
| xx-mail.com/instinctive     http://www.instinctive.de


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