Cheetah 3d 4.3a3 has very impressive and easy to use light map capabilities and (nearly*) seamless workflow to Unity 3d.
You can’t currently just save the C3D .jas files into your Unity project if you’re using two sets of UVs; you have to export as FBX.
I’ve monochromed the lightmap (it had radiosity baked in, but I want to be able to swap texture maps and keep the same lightmap … if I used the full color lightmap the scene would look even better).
Cheetah’s lightmapping is similar to gile in that it automatically generates a new UV map for you (if you want it to) rather than requiring you to painfully lay out the map yourself. You can, of course, completely tweak the UV map(s) and then bake to them. This makes lightmapping approximately a bazillion times easier than most packages. Note that it’s not perfect. There’s some light leaking above the lamps. I haven’t retouched the lightmap or tweaked the model (e.g. putting in bright covers over the lamps…)
I want to join in on the love-fest! Thanks for the great news, podperson! With multiple UV sets nonetheless. Man, I’m already so happy with how Cheetah’s skeletal animation works with Unity. And with Unity 2.0 coming out soon, this is almost too much for me. (I have to get a hold of myself.)
Edit: Oh, yes, podperson, I forgot to add that your graphics look great! That’s the first thing I noticed before I looked for the shadows/lighting.
Hm, it sounded kind of weird when I said I’ll join in on the love-fest…
Cheetah moves more and more into my view. I have downloaded the free version and will try some stuff this weekend. And looking at these results here it seems that cheetah sure can do stuff. The ability to export multiple UVs alone seems worth the money… There were some special export abilities for animations too, right?
And by the way, pretty nice artwork here podperson. I like the way, the corridor leads the player. And i like deep blue
Frank said"There were some special export abilities for animations too, right? "
Its just more streamlined than any other app. You have a window called the take manager, and if you rightclick in here, create new take, you can call it idle or shoot or whatever, and then you can see these named animations in Unity. So you can work on one take, create another, work on that etc. Save to a single native file, and you can call those animations in the usual unity way. Now that feels good…
Its as good as it could possibly get.IMO. And not once has a skinned mesh imported that is screwed up, ie stretched all over the place…Mayas tendency to do that undermined my confidence in the pipeline and my abilities, but cheetah has been a smooth ride. Personally my favorite part of cheetah is the vertex weighting tool. Its a hell of a lot more intuitive than Maya.
And its forum feels like the Unity forum, wheras anything inna autodesk style feels like macdonalds. I urge you all to give it a go, regardless of your current toolset…because I like to see you Happy.
AC
