Umm, Vertex Color / Alpha Rocks!

Sorry if this has been discussed before but I just stumbled my way into it. I've been playing around with Maya and prelighting meshes by baking the vertices. I can bake shading, color, alpha, AND shadows into the vertices and the results are pretty impressive. My only problem now is that I don't have a good way of getting the objects into Blitz. The latest compiled DirectX coverter for Maya does not support vertex color info. The only way I could do it so far was to use Nugrafs Polytrans in demo mode. Anyways, if you have not tried it, give it a look -- if you have Maya of course.

What other 3D apps support this type of functionality?

There is a lightmapping tutorial in the Tutorials board.

Thats a good tutorial. But I don't have Max and I'm specifically talking about vertex colors -- no lightmaps or texture baking. If lightmapping and vertex color baking are the same animals then forgive my ignorance. One problem I see with this is that you need lots of vertices to get a decent look.

here is a simple screenie showing a meshes lit with a point light in Maya. There are no blitz lights in this scene. The grass texture was thrown on in blitz. Oh, the holes you see are Polytrans leaving out every 5th triangle because its a demo.