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DarkBASIC Professional Discussion / You want Light Mapped X., Do ya DO YA!!!

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APEXnow
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Posted: 6th May 2003 01:16
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If anybody's interested, this site offers a Light Map Maker which also supports exporting X files. It requires registration to Save a scene file but the X exporter works fine. The only thing I've found is that you can't combine X lightmap textures and Base textures simultaniously. I'm thinking of modifying the X plugin to merge the lightmap and base textures together.

Oh, and by the way, download the BETA ver, it's the one that actually has the X Importer and X exporter.

Find it at http://www.windssoft.com
"Man who looses key to woman's appartment...... He get no nookie" - A wise chinese man.
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SamotH
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Posted: 6th May 2003 15:44
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have you managed to make it work? it doesn't import my .x files correctly

My wizards are many, but their essence is mine. Forever there are in the hills in their stone homes of grief. Because I am the spirit of their existance. I am them. I am the black wizards
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APEXnow
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Posted: 6th May 2003 15:51
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If it's the scaling, I only managed to get around it by making them really big, I may need to modify the plugin to fix that but I don't have, from a legal point of view, right to supply any mods unless I register the software, which I'm sure I will do. Bloody useful tool though don't ya think?

"Man who looses key to woman's appartment...... He get no nookie" - A wise chinese man.
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Soyuz
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Posted: 6th May 2003 17:35
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if you put some work in on this so it's good for the DB community I'll marry you. Not sure if you're in to guys marrying guys but well maybe I'll just be your bud
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APEXnow
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Posted: 6th May 2003 17:53
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ROFL, thanks but I'm already married, infact my wife just said she'll scratch My eyes out if I even look at another man... err woman LOL

"Man who looses key to woman's appartment...... He get no nookie" - A wise chinese man.
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Zep
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Posted: 6th May 2003 19:42
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As far as I can tell from using this, the output is useless for any type of Level you might creat for DB PRO

It makes 1 lightmap TextureMap, then it is stretched across the level. The Pixelation is HUGE.

Looks good inside the lightmap maker program itself tho, but putting the X file into DB PRO makes it look like a big blobky pixelated ugly thing.

Zep--

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APEXnow
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Posted: 6th May 2003 20:29
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You need to play around with the Lightmap sizes, I've managed to get some reasonably good results from it. The smaller the lightmaps, the more blocky effect you get. Selecting a surface and changing it's patch size to lower values, I've found fairly good results near 1 and below, i.e. 0.5 etc. Experimentation yields good results

"Man who looses key to woman's appartment...... He get no nookie" - A wise chinese man.
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APEXnow
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Posted: 6th May 2003 21:02
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Zep. I've found that the best results are as follows. In LightMap options menu, increase the render size to around 512x512, or higher if you need to but I'm not sure about the Texture size limit under DBPro. Setting the surface patch size for a polygon surface to around 0.1 or 0.05 renders a very smooth light map without pixelation. It's just a metter of experimenting with the values and looking at the light map texture after each render. To view your light maps, select the Textures tab and select lightmaps from the R/M button menu.

"Man who looses key to woman's appartment...... He get no nookie" - A wise chinese man.
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Zep
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Posted: 6th May 2003 21:36
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Ok thanks. I'll play around with it some more.

I did try setting the Sample Spacing to 1 in light map options and increasing the texture size to 1024x1024.

That was a little better as far as pixelation, but it was also much darker with very "hard" edges for the light...i'll try the surface size thing after the current light map finishes compiling and see what happens.

I guess this could be usefull after all.

Zep--

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rapscaLLion
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Posted: 7th May 2003 03:44
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I know it would be a pain, but you could split your levels into smaller sections. This would improve light quality, and you could easily implement VIS to hide the unseen areas. Also, smaller area = less polys = faster collision detection!
=
Overall increase in speed!!!

Alex Wanuch
aka rapscaLLion
Kousen Dev Progress >> Currently Working On Editors
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APEXnow
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Posted: 7th May 2003 15:22
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I concur. I'm still a bit fuddled about the Base Texture Light Map combination thing though. I may have to register the software properly so that I can liase with the crew about it.

"Man who looses key to woman's appartment...... He get no nookie" - A wise chinese man.
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haggisman
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Posted: 7th May 2003 18:04
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You can't really combine the base texture with a lightmap, other than simply creating a second uv set on the model. If you did simply try to combine them it would either create a gigantic texture or a very blurry one.

Specs:- 1GHZ athlon, Radeon8500, 192mb ram, winxp
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APEXnow
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Posted: 7th May 2003 18:46
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I thought about the idea of combining the base and Lightmap textures during the process of .X exporting so that it gave the illusion of multitexturing where as infact it was just the one. You're right about the textures being different sizes but if the Lightmap textures are larger than the base texture, it would be feasible to stretch the base texture across the lightmap texture using an image alpha blend of some sort. I would expect that an update of the .X exporter would be released soon though so I will wait.

Besides, I'm concentrating on the BSP side of DBPro at the moment, trying figure out all the problems I've come across. Check out 3-Dimension chat - The ultimate BSP thread if you're interested.

"Man who looses key to woman's appartment...... He get no nookie" - A wise chinese man.
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Zep
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Posted: 8th May 2003 19:18
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So there is now way in the Light Map Maker program to actually apply the lightmap to the texture?

Far as I can tell there isn't. And the scene, when exported Uses the UV from what the lightmap creates and destroys your UV you setup for the texture.

Which places this program back into the "useless" folder again.

Maybe some day....

Zep--

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APEXnow
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Posted: 8th May 2003 22:09
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It's only in beta stage at the moment, but the usefulness has to improve. I mean, you're right, whats the point of lightmapping if you can't even add textures to the .X models. Like I said, this should change in the near future.



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