Lightmapping / Luminaire

Blitz3D Forums/Blitz3D Programming/Lightmapping / Luminaire

I am trying to get Luminaire to work in Max 5, however it
seems to give very odd results; the textures are not right or in the right place. Also I can only export it with the Panda X exporter for creating X files, but somehow it does not take the textures into account.

Questions;
- Can anybody explain more about Luminaire in Max; how to apply it, what kind of mapping do your objects need for it to work, etc. I have seen the online manual, but it seems by far too vague for me and the results are crappy.

- What X file exporter for Max 5 is best? I tried Xout, but it doesn't work with Max 5 I suppose.

cheers,

John-Robin Smith
www.virtualgotcha.com

jhocking

Do you need to use Luminaire in Max5? I thought Max 5 now bakes lighting into textures as a built-in feature. Note that I've not actually used Max5 yet (I've used up to 4.)

Mustang

MAX 5:

A new Advanced Lighting tool has been added to the rendering menu, offering two different Global Illumination systems. One is the Radiosity solution that was previously available in 3ds Viz 4, and based on the Lightscape engine but enhanced to support adaptive sampling for regathering, a method to refine the radiosity solution, and multi threading. Light Tracer, though is a completely new GI solution better suited for outdoor scenes in conjunction with the new Skylight.

Render to Texture

The Render to Texture tool is also one of the more interesting new features in 3ds max 5.
This technique is also known as texture baking and describes the way to render the lighting and shadows into the textures of the object and reusing them without the need to recalculate the whole lighting process. Radiosity and GI actually become very useful with this tool and game developers as well as architects should be very pleased to see it integrated. After the baking, you can find your original and the baked texture in a Shell Material, a new container type material that just carries two materials for the viewport and renderer.

http://www.digitalpostproduction.com/2002/09_sep/reviews/max5_review4.htm

Zmatrix

With luminare youll need to have everything properly UV maped with no tiling of textures.

Otherwise the Lightmap will also get repeated.

Max5's render to texture would be a better solution.

Zmatrix

jhocking

As far as I know you need properly setup UVs for the built-in render-to-texture. So there's no difference in usage, it is just probably more stable because it is built-in.

Mustang

MAX baking tut:

http://www3.sk.sympatico.ca/kelbeau/max2ued/html/9.html

And although you DO have to have proper UVs for "baked textures" MAX does have handy tools for making that easier now, like "flatten mapping" [copied directly from LW :)]:

http://waylon-art.com/uvw_tutorial/uvwtut_06.html

Binary_Moon

Actually unless you specify a specific mapping channel max automatically creates uv coordinates for baked textures. this isn't ideal (totally rubbish) for actual textures but for lightmaps it works fine.

jhocking

Good tip, I didn't know that.

John-Robin

thanks guys! much appreciated, will try it.

John-Robin