Guild of Writers

I was curious, so I thought I'd throw this out there. I do a lot of interior spaces in the ages I build. As such I use Lightmaps quite often. What I've noticed, when looking at the ones the tutorial suggests, verses the ones Cyan uses, is one big difference. Cyan handpaints their own lightmaps, rather than use lighting and baking to get the desired effect. In Blender this is especially problematic if you want the lightmap to look just right. (rather than circles on the floor etc.). What I was going to throw out there, is to see how usefull an addition to the Lightmap Tutorial would be, describing the process of handpainting you're own lightmaps, and then following the steps to add texturing the object to register the lightmap. I've found that hand painting them gives a much more realistic feel then baking them. What I was going to do is write up and add a second tutorial similiar to advanced sounds, that describes the handpainting process. I just wanted to know if this would be something people would be interested in having. The instructions to do this in blender etc.

Hell yeah! While baking does the job, a handmade lightmap can give more beautiful, results. Same thing as shooting a movie: you can flood the scene with light or spend hours placing spot lights, fill lights, etc.

Also realism isn't always the desired effect. Tou may wish a more artistic result.

The more you guys write wiki pages, the easier it will be for me when I finally can get to making Ages!

While I fully support any writing of additional tutorials, I feel I should point out that the blanket assertion that Cyan does not bake their lightmaps is wrong. Since so far, the entire population of this thread seems to consist of people familiar with prp explorer/similar prp editors, I'll just cite an example.

AhnySphere01.age/Sphere01OutBuildingInterior/Material/lever_HutInner_LIGHTMAPGEN/Piggybacks/Layer/Sphere01OutBuildingInteriorlever_HutInner_LIGHTMAPGEN/Sphere01OutBuildingInteriorlever_HutInner_LIGHTMAPGEN_mip_DX

Tell me that's not baked.

All I see is yellow blotches and shadows. I'll have to look at it in the game. But yeah, of course they probably use both methods.

As an aside, it could also be worth noting that while baking a light/shadow/envmap, one is not restricted to the light points used in-game, but can add anything blender can render, so soft lights and complex arrays of light sources (which could in many cases be mimicked in-game with projection lights) and maybe even caustics (assuming we can bake with yafray) are well at hand.
As a guiding help with optic accuracy, when handpainting, nothing stops us from retouching a prebaked lightmap. :)

EDIT: Err.. and yes, that tutorial would be nice! (forgot the one important and on topic bit :P)

Textures from Gahreesen.......these are lightmaps for inside the training building.