Hi,
I’ve been asking about this before and I thought I got the hang of it, but apparently there are still gaps…
When you render a lighting map with Max’s render to texture, do you leave your diffuse texture, normal map, etc. on?
I just realized that the normal map does affect the lighting map and I left it on with great expectations - well, it does show in the end result, but it also seems to tint the object blue! Especially in the shadowed areas. Has anyone experienced this? Should I just keep rendering lighting maps without the normal map in place?
Thanks!
Make sure your normal map is set as a normal map, not a texture. Also try avoid baking complete maps, otherwise you’re going to get a ghosted low resolution copy of your actual textures. Just bake the lighting. The normal map will/should help avoid the flat lighting as it should be taken into account. It may depend on what renderer you use for it though, I’ve really not experimented beyond using Vray and Flatiron, which seems to do the trick.
Course, with Unity 3, you don’t really need it anymore since you can do it all right there within Unity, (I wont get into which gives better results, Beast or Vray… Vray hehe, both methods have their pros and cons).
Hi, thanks for the reply!
I use mental ray but it should work for texture rendering just fine. I use A&D materials and my normal maps are connected as normal maps.
I did render lighting map only, but the diffuse textures have a huge impact on the render time anyway. I got interested on experimenting if the results are the same even if I leave the diffuse texture away - and they seemed close enough and rendered so much faster 
It’s just this horrible blue tint on the light maps - I’m just rendering the map again with textures back on and a little bit different render settings - I’m thinking it might be the mr Physical sky giving too much blue skylight, but it’s weird because it doesn’t show in regular renders.
Yeah, Beast would be nice, but I’m on Unity free :-/ Without the GI it doesn’t look too hot.
EDIT: in fact it’s like the white balance would be off - and yet it’s at the default 6500K… I will mess with that next.
The normal is somehow causing this
I made several tests and finally ended up with a clear difference.
Here are 2 screenshots, the other is done with everything else having the same gray A&D material, without any textures. And the wall has a another material, also without any textures.
In the other shot, the normal map is plugged in the wall’s material - and blue it goes!
Darn. I guess I need to bake the lights without the normal maps then.
