BSP lightmap tag extraction get!

[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):

[jahrain]

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.

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):

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.

[SuperSunny]

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

[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.

[jahrain]

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.

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.

[Rob Oplawar]

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.

[jahrain]

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.

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.

[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?

[Limited]

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?

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

[jahrain]

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.










Oh and this is what the lightmaps bitmap that I had to compile looks like:

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.