BSP lightmap tag extraction get!

This is the first step along the way of creating an alternative lightmapping solution. What I managed to do was port my bsp extractor to work for the halo 2 tags as well which to my surprise most BSP information is also stored in the lightmap tags. Heres a shot of what my BSP extractor was able to extract from the example_example_lightmap.scenario_structure_lightm ap tag allone.

http://img62.imageshack.us/img62/775...3393121kw9.jpg


So what makes having this model so nifty? Well, mental ray has the feature called texture baking which bakes on the lighting from a render onto a set of textures based on their UVs. With this, we can fully light up the scene as if we were to render it and bake all of the lighting onto a set of textures which corresponds to the lightmap bitmap that was originally assigned to it. Mental ray is also capable of photon mapping, as well as many other nifty lighting features and the ability to render them at any texture resolution for very high res lightmaps allowing fine shadowing details generated in a small fraction of the time it would take Sapien to render a low quality preview. The only trade off is more work to do in the 3d application such as placing lights, scenery objects, sky dome image for image based lighting etc. Maya has some nifty tools that make texture baking a piece of cake (no pun intended).

So far it seems to work pretty well for extracting the base BSP model, but I am still having trouble getting the BSP instances properly generated and placed when extracting. So for right now, this will work perfectly for maps without geometry instances, but will require more work for maps with them since they have to be manually placed after extracted. This tool also works with Halo 1 bsp tags as well, but that one has some bugs as well to work out. What I plan to do when I have this instead read the scenario tag instead and place all the scenery objects accordingly and also extract the lightmap bitmaps automatically as well.

Nice work jahrain :D.

But texture baking doesnt give dynamic lights a chance to be dynamic yeah?

Gives us more control of what we want the lights to look like which rocks so gj

Dynamic lights have nothing to do with the lightmap.. right?

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Originally Posted by Snaver

Dynamic lights have nothing to do with the lightmap.. right?

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It was a trick question >_>not
I never really understood lighting in halo 1

If anyone wants to give texture baking a try for their map let me know or contact me on AIM. I have 2 current builds right now, one works for CE, the other works for Halo 2. Right now the work needed to get the baking done is pretty grueling. I hope to make it more dynamic and include some max/maya scripts to do most of the work.

howd you make a map in Maya?

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Originally Posted by Melterx12

howd you make a map in Maya?

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This isn't the thread for that kind of questions, is it? Google.

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Originally Posted by Melterx12

howd you make a map in Maya?

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What I managed to do was port my bsp extractor to work for the halo 2 tags as well which to my surprise most BSP information is also stored in the lightmap tags.

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Did you even read the topic?


Jahrain, wouldn't this cause a style problem? I remember how well this worked when everything was baked in the map, but say sticking a baked biped of yours into bloodgulch.map caused it to look out of place.

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Originally Posted by Zeph

Jahrain, wouldn't this cause a style problem? I remember how well this worked when everything was baked in the map, but say sticking a baked biped of yours into bloodgulch.map caused it to look out of place.

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Baked textures + baked lightmaps fits together perfectly. The reason it looked out of place is because of that, the missing baked lightmaps. Anyways, lightmaps are baked onto the map by sapien using photon mapping. This just takes too slow and the quality isn't worth it's time. I'm working on a mental ray baked version of blood gulch right now. I'm still tweaking with the lighting but I can tell you right now that it only takes about 10 mins to render lightmaps in mental ray for BG on about 15 bitmaps, ranging from texture sizes 2048x1024 to 128x256 compared to 128x64 to 16x8 sized bitmaps that sapien generates. The leap in quality lighting in the map will be tremendous. It would be the equivalence of running lightmaps in sapien at quality 20, which > 1 is impossible.

nice - but still not a fan of baked textures - fake

EDIT* i get it now lol

>_> not baked textures, baked lightmaps.... Its the SAME thing Sapien does, but mental ray does better and faster. I'l post a pic of it when I get it ingame, some people are still confused of what this is.

I prefer my maps half baked :eng101:

Do you like your cookies half baked too?

oh, btw, heres my lightmaps i generated for Bloodgulch.
http://img159.imageshack.us/img159/4...5320956jo3.jpg
http://img129.imageshack.us/img129/3...5322487ln9.jpg

Notice how sharp the shadows are, and also the quality of lighting on th scene. I'll get this ingame for a better idea of what the final product will look like compared to the best you could get from sapien.

May I be damned if am the only one who knew what you were talking about before you posted that pic.
The fps rate will be better ingame right:maddowns:

Ok heres what it looks like ingame. Btw, this in CE, not Halo 2, my H2EK Sapien doesn't work for me, but it works the same way.

Heres Bloodgulch's lightmaps which were generated in sapien
http://img356.imageshack.us/img356/7...6064990ou3.jpg


And heres a comparison shot of what I did with Mental Ray
http://img458.imageshack.us/img458/9...6024895ee7.jpg
notice the shadows almost match the detail of the vehicles on the scene


heres some more:
http://img115.imageshack.us/img115/6...6031732zg9.jpg
http://img115.imageshack.us/img115/8...6035881gd9.jpg

The shadows are kinda pixelated. In mental ray's render settings i just need to adjust the shadow smoothness. But other than that, this is just showing the amount of lighting detail that can be obtained when generating lightmaps in an external application.

And btw, this has had very little impact on the FPS of the map. Lightmaps arn't shaders, just textures so they don't require many gfx computations to display on the screen. So higher res lightmap's only real trade off is a large map file size. The lightmaps for this map is almost 3mb alone.

Sexi, maybe you can pursuade lightning to give us some in game pictures of your lightmap in h2v :)

Oh, that's much better. I'm lovin' it.

Very nice Jahrain. :D

ZOMG!

I'm baking some lightmaps in 3ds right now to see if anything can be done with them.

Here: (Light Element Baked at 512 with Final Gather at 50. The colors are from the Final Gather bounces):

http://img167.imageshack.us/img167/6...tingmapjb3.jpg

Btw, just to let everyone, those lightmaps for BG only tool 12 minutes! To render equivalent quality with sapien, if it were possible, would take weeks, if not months. As you can see there are much more advantages to this.

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Originally Posted by SuperSunny

I'm baking some lightmaps in 3ds right now to see if anything can be done with them.

Here: (Light Element Baked at 512 with Final Gather at 50. The colors are from the Final Gather bounces):

http://img167.imageshack.us/img167/6...tingmapjb3.jpg

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Don't forget to use the option to fill the black space with extended color pixels from the edges of after the filtering and its in the map you will see a bunch of black boarders around ingame around everywhere the UV maps are separated.

Ah alrighty! This seems fairly simple to do your own lighting, as long as it works right!

I'm intrigued by this...
Oh drat that only applies to outdoor areas with only one light source, doesn't it? I was gonna say I'd love to see how Bridge would look with high quality lightmaps (as good as it looks already with quality 0 interrupted radiosity), but I'm guessing it would be a nightmare to set up all the light objects in 3DS to match up with all the strip lights in the hallways, if it's even possible to do it with more than one light source. Unless there's a way to have the textures themselves emit light like in tool's radiosity?
I would be ecstatic if it could be done that way, because I have 7 BSPs with 50-60k polys each- it's gonna take for fuckin ever in tool. Actually, the lightmaps would probably take up a couple dozen megs if I made them any bigger.

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Originally Posted by Rob Oplawar

I'm intrigued by this...
Oh drat that only applies to outdoor areas with only one light source, doesn't it? I was gonna say I'd love to see how Bridge would look with high quality lightmaps (as good as it looks already with quality 0 interrupted radiosity), but I'm guessing it would be a nightmare to set up all the light objects in 3DS to match up with all the strip lights in the hallways, if it's even possible to do it with more than one light source. Unless there's a way to have the textures themselves emit light like in tool's radiosity?
I would be ecstatic if it could be done that way, because I have 7 BSPs with 50-60k polys each- it's gonna take for fuckin ever in tool. Actually, the lightmaps would probably take up a couple dozen megs if I made them any bigger.

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Mental ray does photon mapping just like Sapien. All you need to do is set the texture (which emits lights) to have a high brightness of incandescents and it will work just like a light source but as a texture. Its what I did for the skydome when I rendered bloodgulch. So basically the skybox works as a image based light source as well. The only work would be to change the settings for the textures so that they emit light when doing final gathering with mental ray.

neat. how would i go about doing lightmaps in this fashion? i'm gonna need some pretty detailed instructions cause i'm a nub.
We'll see how big they are and if the tag size isn't too big I'll stick with it. Lucky me I'm just about done with the next bsp that needs some quick lightmaps.

ot: oh lol nice you have 77 posts. i'm excited for 343 myself.

edit: you said earlier to contact you via aim, but I didn't see a name posted on your profile- am i to assume it's jahrain? lol mine's roboplawar, after all.

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neat. how would i go about doing lightmaps in this fashion? i'm gonna need some pretty detailed instructions cause i'm a nub.
We'll see how big they are and if the tag size isn't too big I'll stick with it. Lucky me I'm just about done with the next bsp that needs some quick lightmaps.

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Sorry but this is just going to be one of those hardcore mapping enthusiast's solution to lightmapping so don't expect the entire process to be "noob friendly". You need to know how to do lightmapping/texture baking in what ever particular software you use. Most detailed tutorials on that subject are pretty extensive, it's something you must learn how to do since I would end up spending more effort writing detailed lightmapping tutorials than working on the program. Also even scene lighting and rendering knowledge is a minimum requirement. I will try my best to make my program do as much as it can to make the process as easy as possible, but one thing you can't make software to do is have it work effort free.

Hmm if I read your first post right you found a way to bake lighting on the textures but it doesn't affect stuff like scenery and vehicles wasn't this already possible in halo 1?

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Originally Posted by phase

Hmm if I read your first post right you found a way to bake lighting on the textures but it doesn't affect stuff like scenery and vehicles wasn't this already possible in halo 1?

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Yes. But this is a halo 2 forum. So we want it possible in h2v. Duh

I spent some more time and rendered a higher quality lightmap. This one took about 30 mins total to render. Also I manually manipulated some of the lighting in certain points by hand in photoshop, another advantage of using this method. In some of these pics I disabled fog to get a better look at the high depth lightmapping now made possible. I got the texture resolution to be as high so they look consistent and about the same resolution as the biped and vehicle's shadows. It looks as if its almost dynamic shadows. If it wasn't for the intentionally unrealistic looking textures, it may be possible to get maps to look almost photo realistic using whats possible in Halo 2's engine with this new method of high depth lightmapping.
http://img473.imageshack.us/img473/8...1305658no3.jpg
http://img473.imageshack.us/img473/3...1320055zg8.jpg
http://img525.imageshack.us/img525/1...1324945xq2.jpg
http://img526.imageshack.us/img526/6...1334156ex6.jpg
http://img525.imageshack.us/img525/8...1334853ns6.jpg
http://img167.imageshack.us/img167/4...1353950vo1.jpg
http://img502.imageshack.us/img502/2...1360595br2.jpg



Oh and this is what the lightmaps bitmap that I had to compile looks like:
http://img123.imageshack.us/img123/3...copyou6.th.jpg
Beware, this is extremely huge; click it after you open it to blow it up to full size (about 2100 x 9500 pixels).

I'm waiting on Lightning and Sunny to show me their results with this for their Halo 2 maps. It should look pretty awesome if they get it right.

I'm not a fan of the lighting on the base looks too dark to me :P

What happens if you move a vehicle, those shadows are dynamic right? Halo detects where the hog is and puts a shadow in correct position

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it's something you must learn how to do

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Alright, I understand. I'm off to find some good tutorials. I spose if I find any particularly useful ones I'll post them here.

A tutorail on how to bake lightmaps into textures
http://www.evermotion.org/tutorials/rendering/bake3d/
found a nother tutorail:http://www.spot3d.com/vray/help/150R...king_part1.htm

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Originally Posted by Limited

What happens if you move a vehicle, those shadows are dynamic right? Halo detects where the hog is and puts a shadow in correct position

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u r nubnub. Those shadows are coming from the vehicles, not the lightmap. Or is your gfx card not hitler enough to render shadows?

nubnub Ltd.

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Originally Posted by Limited

I'm not a fan of the lighting on the base looks too dark to me :P

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I did that intentionally to contrast the lighting. This isn't a final polished map to be released. I'm just showing what is capable.

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Originally Posted by Limited

What happens if you move a vehicle, those shadows are dynamic right? Halo detects where the hog is and puts a shadow in correct position

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Uh, duh. For units with collision geometry, Halo checks all radiosity and dynamic light sources near a unit, and then calculate which direction the shadow goes.

I got it working, thanks to Jahrain's app.

He is right, this is NOT for beginners. It involves texture baking and some other complicated procedures for 3ds users. But the end result is beautiful. In 3ds you do not have to do change any edge options, it appears fine in Halo.

Here is a simple test. I'll work on a better one.

http://i16.tinypic.com/5xh68ls.jpg

Wow, great job. But it looks like you forgot to place the scenery in the map. Have any more pics? And what resolutions did you render the lightmaps?

He rendered them at 1024(talking to him)... also, do you mind getting on AIM? I'd like to try out the app too if it isn't too late.

MAYA FTW TBH




Just had to say that :P


This can do full lightmaps in less than what, 30 minutes?


:cool:

10 mins, for 2048 x 2048 maps on my machine.

So far (though I have to edit UVs) I can get a 2048 to bake on Damnation in a matter of a minute. I don't really have the UVs so I can't move mine around yet, though I imagine it wouldn't take so long to move around.

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Originally Posted by jahrain

Wow, great job. But it looks like you forgot to place the scenery in the map. Have any more pics? And what resolutions did you render the lightmaps?

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Ah, the scenery are crate files so the shadowing should appear in-game. (Sapien) 1024 res. I'm doing another at 2048. 3ds has some issues I need to mention, next time you're on AIM. I'll get newer screenies in soon.

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Originally Posted by jahrain

10 mins, for 2048 x 2048 maps on my machine.

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oh SNAAAAAAAAAAAAAAP

=3

http://i8.tinypic.com/4v7jho4.jpg

http://i19.tinypic.com/6c4yazn.jpg

http://i8.tinypic.com/6bolxkh.jpg

Some obvious errors and the smoothening to the lights need to be applied, but hell, we're getting somewhere!

Yeah, are you using final gathering though?

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Originally Posted by jahrain

Yeah, are you using final gathering though?

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Nope, I did it quickly with some area omni's and raytraced shadowing. Next roundabout I shall do final gathering at 100.

Ah is, see.

Jahrain can you PM this app for Halo:CE, I was to munk with it but I cant ever seem to catch you on aim.

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Originally Posted by Kalubâ„¢

Jahrain can you PM this app for Halo:CE, I was to munk with it but I cant ever seem to catch you on aim.

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Dont listen to him jahrain!!! Bio's gonna rip the bsp and sell them on ebay!!! Lights kinda bright sunny lol.

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Originally Posted by Kalubâ„¢

Jahrain can you PM this app for Halo:CE, I was to munk with it but I cant ever seem to catch you on aim.

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I have source $_$ :p

Jahrain could you also send me the apps for halo: CE and Halo 2 in a PM? I would love to try these apps out on Sunday when I get back in town. If you can't send them via pm I'll send over my email but you should have it (I'm the same guy from the gbx forums.) Great work by the way.

Heh, nice job jahrain. It kinda makes me wonder why nobody had done this before, if it was CE compatible...

I wanted to rip it apart yes, and then look at how it works and somehow make a maxscript to make it easier since everyone has said it is a rigorous task.

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Originally Posted by Kalubâ„¢

I wanted to rip it apart yes, and then look at how it works and somehow make a maxscript to make it easier since everyone has said it is a rigorous task.

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That would be excellent. Contact me on aim when ever possible.

Actually, the old Blood Gulch lightmaps were more accurate for a scene in broad daylight. Shadows shouldn't be that defined when you have an immensely bright light source having its rays scattered and diffused in every direction.

So, yeah, MR is faster, but why is it faster? I doubt it's some magic code overcoming the fact that Maya has a ton more resource overhead than Tool. More likely it's just not doing as much. Which is fine, because options are always nice to have.

Actually, bloodgulch's default lightmaps would be more accurate if the sky was more cloudy, dimming the sunlight, and scattering more light. That can be done more accurately, for much more soft shadows and light scattering with mental ray. Mental ray happens to take full use of multicore GPUs, which is one reason why its faster. It also vastly optimized and advanced than tool or sapien as since it was created by a much more experienced team of software engineers who's field of expertise is in nothing but rendering, as compared to a team of game developers. Mental ray does allot more than tool or sapien could ever do, but the thing is, your not limited to using mental ray. You could use brazil (if its capable of texture baking) and many other rendering clients.

And along with what jahrain said, even if it really was doing less, it looks better, and that is the only thing that would be the matter anyway. Faster + better looks = win.

And Customizable too.

And suddenly!

(UV Black Line errors but easily fixable in a matter of seconds)

http://i17.tinypic.com/5y17j4m.jpg
http://i17.tinypic.com/4xmcgg1.jpg
http://i15.tinypic.com/4zlcww7.jpg

Pure win.

:awesome:

:wtc: reading rainbow :-3

Nice!, but looks like you forgot to have it fill the black space with extended edge color pixels cuz i noticed those sharp black lines.

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Originally Posted by Kornman00

:wtc: reading rainbow :-3

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what the hell is a "reading rainbow"? :lmao:
LMAO

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Originally Posted by bleach

what the hell is a "reading rainbow"? :lmao:
LMAO

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:gtfo:
It's my favorite show, noob.

ok nvm. I looked it up on wikipedia. It some kind of book show.

I know, anyway, I can't seem to notice the "harsh black edges." I'm sure if I saw an example without them, however, I'd be able to.

http://img352.imageshack.us/img352/5994/jaggieszo7.jpg

Lol, I thought those were part of the UVing >_>. Thanks for pointing that out jahrain.

I'm basically trying to figure out how to do that exactly in 3ds texture baking :P

But, those lines, I believe, appeared because I downsized with bicubic sharper from 4096 res to 2048 (Halo cannot compile 4096). If I took that away it may appear correctly, like the other ones.

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Originally Posted by SuperSunny

I'm basically trying to figure out how to do that exactly in 3ds texture baking :P

But, those lines, I believe, appeared because I downsized with bicubic sharper from 4096 res to 2048 (Halo cannot compile 4096). If I took that away it may appear correctly, like the other ones.

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Oh, well i'm not too sure then. Once you figure it out though, you should be able to downsize it no problem. To get best quality with little or no jaggies on shadows, you should run lightmaps at a very high res (sharp shadows will not be anti aliased) but when you downsize it, it anti aliases them.

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Originally Posted by Kornman00

:wtc: reading rainbow :-3

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Indeed !!!

wow, this is very interesting...

the outcome looks quite amazing. how would one go about learning/experimenting with this themselves? i'd like to try it out. any help would be much appreciated.


~Scooby

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Originally Posted by jahrain

Oh, well i'm not too sure then. Once you figure it out though, you should be able to downsize it no problem. To get best quality with little or no jaggies on shadows, you should run lightmaps at a very high res (sharp shadows will not be anti aliased) but when you downsize it, it anti aliases them.

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Hm, it's strange how it works in 3ds. For these recent screenies I did downsize them for the anti-alias effect and it worked pretty well on the shadows. It just bled the edges, though. But when I render at native 2048, it doesn't bleed at the edges, yet isn't anti-aliased! Ahh!

Good thing I have Maya :awesome:

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Originally Posted by SuperSunny

Hm, it's strange how it works in 3ds. For these recent screenies I did downsize them for the anti-alias effect and it worked pretty well on the shadows. It just bled the edges, though. But when I render at native 2048, it doesn't bleed at the edges, yet isn't anti-aliased! Ahh!

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Still haven't found out that extend edge pixel option yet? Darn, well looks like your caught up in an epic struggle between jaggies and bleeders.

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Originally Posted by Scooby Doo

wow, this is very interesting...

the outcome looks quite amazing. how would one go about learning/experimenting with this themselves? i'd like to try it out. any help would be much appreciated.


~Scooby

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First thing to go do is read up some tutorials on how to do texture baking. Once you get that down, your pretty much set. Contact me on AIM and I will send you the current builds of the lightmap extraction tools. They are very buggy, and the process is complicated, but for now, gets enough a job done to test out how it will look ingame.

Are you using the automatic unwrap to render to texture? Because doing it manually should help make the lightmaps neater, use up more bitmap space, etc.

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Originally Posted by Ã�4ÑØ â€*

Good thing I have Maya :awesome:

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As do I, gosh mister.

Any way I can get a hold of this app? Also, does this even support custom UVs for the lightmap? If it doesn't how do you extract the ones that tool generates for my bakes?

Way to bump a thread from 2007

Download it from here http://www.jahrain.com/stuff/bsp_lightmap_extractor.rar

Are you sure that this one works with H2v and not H:CE?

I got this while trying to load it:
Attachment 2666

go on google, download that file, then register it to your computer using cmd. If you don't know how to register a file to your computer google that as well.

Yeah thats the CE version, I tested it to make sure. I did find some old light-map related code (from Jahrain) which might have been what you are looking for, I passed it on to Kant months ago.

So can I get a version that works with H2v instead?

No one has it, broski

Boski is sad now. Maybe in the next release of Ambiguous you can find a way to extract all the geo and lightmap UVs and a way to replace lightmap tags?

:mech: Broski I'm not some amazing person at this stuff, it's taken me along time to get as far as i have from basically my own trial and error.

So all in due time