[WIP] Precipice

You bastards, wait until September for this epicness! I can't join in! Ever! I've always missed the gamenights- I refuse to miss the one my map is part of as well. Lol.

Also, lightmaps: wtf. Got some basic ones imported via aether. First there was all this random red- confused the hell out of me. Until I realized it was max telling me that every red place was a glitched render spot. - _ - So I fixed the red by turning the glitch test off, but then you can just see all the glitches. And tool's fail lightmap uvs are now incredibly apparent- shadows start on one lightmap, and just stop on the next one, shading fades in and out from object to object, it's bizarre. So I decided screw it, I'll render every lightmap at 2048 by 2048. I'll be back tomorrow explaining just how much the game hates me now.

Edit: Okay, after some frustrating trial and error, I'm finally getting the hang of this. I managed to render one lightmap without any red errors, but the shadows are still doing odd things. Still, it's progress. We had a short-lived and laggy playtest today, which basically confirmed that the new layout seems to work well enough to forward with it. I'm leaving for 2 weeks on vacation with my family, but I'll be back after that, and ready to work on finishing up the bsp with the last of the poly space, and getting those lightmaps fixed up. I've talked to Inferno about fixing the phantom geometry as well, so that shouldn't be an issue for long. Let's finish this damned project, shall we?

Edit Edit: Before I leave, I wanted to make sure everyone understands that although the lighting looks great in Max, I have no idea how good it will actually look in the engine. At the best it will be lower res- at the worst it will be all pixelly and fugly looking. But I'm going to do my best to make sure it looks as good as possible. If that means rerendering a bunch of times to get the settings right, and reuving half the lightmaps, so be it. Also, it looks like a few of the lightmaps still have errors- I'll have to fix that after I get back. Still, better than before.

Edit Edit Edit: Okay, this is getting ridiculous. More people need to post so I don't have to do this so as not to double post. :P

I was heading out the door when I realized the lightmaps had finished rendering- took a screenshot from generally the same angle as one of the renders on the last page. Should provide a pretty good comparison from render to current ingame lighting. It's pretty darn rough, but tool uv and rendering errors aside, it looks better than Halo's lighting did.

What's with the weird lines on the wall?

Those would be the aforementioned uv errors. They're everywhere- will be quite the undertaking to try to fix them all.

This stuff looks not only vastly improved, but incredibly well done! Once again, I can't wait till this is released.

I pray for your lightmaps, but the shear size of your map makes me lose hope. I really hope you can work this out, because I was practically creaming myself over those previous renders. Good luck to you, and godsend.

Haha thanks. Im hoping to get them looking better as well. I've heard that setting all the shaders to "simple parameterization" forces tool to make them less retarded- is this true? If so, I'll change them all to that, and even if they look bad in Halo radiosity, the uvs might be better for max lightmap rendering.

dont suppose anyone can make a way to import custom lightmap-UVs into halo eh?

FireScythe's UserTool has a command that can import new UV's from an .obj file. More information is here

Yep, I know Firescythe's stuff can do it- it's that Halo has happily split entire areas into two separate bitmaps- even by fixing uvs you can't fix that. So half the platform will be on one bitmap, and the other one will be on another. I can try to line the bitmaps up as best I can, but it still still look weird until I get the entire platform together on one bitmap. I was wondering if simple parameterization forces tool to put larger sections together. Idk- might not.

Oh god yes. Simple param is important. Simple param means "Not Retarded Lightmaps" mode.