Offical crap load of questions thread

[LlamaMaster]

The thing to remember is that lightmap uvs rewrite themselves to the size of whatever your uvs are

Could you clarify this? Do you mean that lightmap UV's scale themselves to better fit the BSP UV's?

Therefore, do what you were doing with the cliffs, but then shrink the entire cliff down.

Shrinking the cliffs down would limit the amount of detail that can be in its UV space. I assume you just mean that every poly in a single lightmap mesh should fit within the 0-1 UV space without overlapping?

My overall suggestion is to take the largest chunks of the lightmap, seamlessly uv them, fit them together like a puzzle, and then fit all the little pieces left over in between the larger chunks. It's a total pain in the ass, but it results in fairly seamless uvs. That's what I did for Precipice.

So basically, seams do matter for lightmaps. The method you just described is what I thought would leave a lot of wasted UV space, but from what you are saying it seems like the benefits would outweigh the cost. Jesus though, I'm not looking forward to this.

I do have one more question about lightmap meshes though. How exactly does Sapien decide how to separate the BSP into sections? Some of my lightmap models cover large areas of the map, some cover very small areas, and one only covers a single rope (where the other rope belongs to a larger lightmap mesh). Is there any logic to this? It seems pretty wasteful and disjointed.

First of all, how is this thread "official"?

Second, start a new thread, this one is way too old.

It's "official" because I thought that was a good thread name at the time. Also, why does it matter how old the thread is? I've posted my questions in this thread over the years so I don't have to create a thread for every little question I have.