Can lightmaps crash URU?

[J'Kla]

Ok I'm downloading it but I don't guarantee any results

[Justintime9]

thx I really appreciate it

[J'Kla]

I've unpacked it and cant export yet I am rebuilding part of my drive (long story).

But as a first view I noticed it had two init files one blank and one normal I don't know if that would cause your problem but it probably would not hurt to try a copy with the blank one removed?

[Justintime9]

Hmm... interesting, never noticed that.
the weird thing is, after I export, the blank init file reappears! :O
unfortunately the age still crashes

[Christian Walther]

Uru freezes for me while linking to that age. It stops doing that and I link successfully (though into a somewhat dark environment) when I delete all your spotlights in layer 4. So I'd look in that direction, it may be the ridiculous number of lights that's freaking it out.

By the way, you forgot to pack White Carpet.bmp.

[andylegate]

I'm downloading your blend file to take a look now.

Justin. Rapidshare sucks. Why not simply ask Nynaveve for room on our server? It's free, and pretty much fast. No annoying "Oh, you ain't a paying customer? You must wait for 1 minute to download, and we're going to choke the bandwidth just to annoy you for not being one of our customers....."

[andylegate]

Okay, finally done downloading. I've got your Age loaded up in Blender now.

Justin, that's an insane amount of lights to have with Ray Shadows turned on. Uru is going to have kittens trying to cast that many avatar shadows. You need them on to make proper light maps. But once you have your light maps made, you should turn Ray Shadows back off. Only have them on for main lights here and there. I would not be surprised if that's causing the crash. I'm going to go look at other things.

[Justintime9]

Ah, that must be the problem then... I actually don't get avatar shadows in player created ages, so I wouldn't know XD (video card )

and as far as rapidshare, this is my first time using it, I was just sick of Media fire, so I thought I'd try something different

anyway, thx for the help guys, let's hope this works

[andylegate]

Okay, found other stuff too:

Your light maps, you need to have the "Amb" button on for each light map texture, or it will not appear right in your Age.

And I made a mistake, it was Buf.Shadows you had on. I've turned them all off. Put in a rug texture to replace the missing one, and yet I'm crashing when I go to link in.

120 lamps.....Justin, is it that necessary? Once you've made the light maps, unless you're still trying to light up the avatar itself, I don't see the need for over 120 lamps.

Your mainRoom prp is over 20 MB big, while you texture PRP is only 4 MB. I've never seen that before...

27,000 faces??? Jeez! I'm surprised it even exported. I thought the Dev's had put a cap on objects so that no more than 10,000 could export, anything higher would cause a export error. I'm going to break that mesh up. That's just way too many for one object for goodness sakes.

[andylegate]

Okay Justin, I was able to link in with out crashing several times okay. It's the lights. Or rather it's the over kill of them. Too many lights for Uru to deal with is the problem.

It should not take quite so many lights to light up your Age. It could take that many to make your light maps that you want, sure, but then you'll need to take them out after words and only leave in the lights to light up your objects and the avatar.

Remember, the key to making an Age look illuminated is with the textures you use or create, NOT the lights themselves. They help, sure, but what makes something bright is the texture itself. Take a look at your arm chair. I love your floor lamp by the way, you did a great job with it. Now if you want to light the chair up better, put a spot over it with the same location as the floor lamp, and make a light map for it. Then turn ray shadows off on it, but you can leave that light there, keeping in mind that the main thing it will light up is a person's avatar. Its the lightmap itself that will make the chair APPEAR to be lit up by the light.

A few omni lights above and below with ray shadows off will light up your whole age for you. How bright and what color is up to you, but it will illuminate the meshes enough so that you can see them. Just keep in mind what I said, you actually light up your Age with textures, texture painting, vertex painting and lightmaps, not with lamps. If you look at Cyan's Ages in Blender, you can see, most of the lamps they use are for lighting up your Avie, not the Age. Here's some pics I took:

Oh, BTW, the one square room with all the lit up stained glass? I took the walls that you had as one seperate mesh with 27,000 faces and cut it up into 4 seperate meshes. But it is too many lights that are your problem.

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