Hello everyone! I woud very much appreciate it if someone could help me understand the process of lightmapping, especially from Maya. I have a run time which is UVd and has appropriate shaders assigned to individual objects/faces. Those shaders have textures and are appropriately mapped.
Since they are groups and combines of different objects would I ‘burn’ the lighting info into individual textures for every object/poly combine? I have seen some minimal info. on the web and many people create one large lightmap, yet keep individual UVs and textures separate from the light map. Any and all information would be very helpful, and perhaps some advice on either technique. I am new to realtime graphics, coming from a traditional CG pipeline of software rendering, this is still very new to me. Thanks for any help for this Noob!!!
Cheers,
Gary Haus
well as you coming from it via Maya then for lightmapping i’d suggest using vertex baking… as that will be separate from any UV maps and Unity supports is very well.
But the easiest approach is to have 1 UV set for your colour, bump, diffuse etc. And 1 UV set for the lightmap bake…
This is a good tutorial for lightmapping using UVs:
Here is one for vertex baking:
Or a good DVD:
http://www.digitalriver.com/dr/sat5/ec_MAIN.Entry10?SP=10023&PN=1&V1=782586&xid=41806&CID=0&CUR=978&DSP=&PGRP=0&ABCODE=&CACHE_ID=0
cheers.
thylacine,
Thanks for the links/help. I was investigating using vertex lit to handle my issue. However, I do NOT want tons and tons of polys(so you I have enough verts for quality lighting) The runtime will have very high poly counts anyway. I guess what I am looking for is a way to ‘layer’ or mulitply the lightmapping over the textures I have assigned from Maya, instead of baking 1 texture per object throughout the entire scene.
This is critical as many of my textures need to repeat, be recycled(think stone walls, etc.) Having so many object/combines I will NOT have enough texture memory to handle all of it and have the texture quality high enough.
So that being said, could anyone explain how to use lightmapping(non-vertex lit) as a mulitply option, and if so how can I create 1 map for my entire scene like I have seen other screen shots around the web depicting?
Thanks for your time everyone.
Maybe OTEE can help out since there is no finished documentation under the lightmapping section of the tutorials???
Cheers,
Gary