Help Untangling Damar

[Whilyam]

I'm curious if anyone has ever had this problem or knows how to fix it. Damar was developed by another person previously and he did some great things to make the Age atmospheric, but hard to change or add on to. So I've been ripping out and simplifying a lot of things lately. One thing that's confounding me is the lightmaps. The best way I can describe it is that it seems to always render the ambient occlusion map. No matter how many or what color lights I have, it always renders something that looks like an ambient occlusion map. Has anyone experienced this? It's one of the hurdles I have with developing it because it's impossible to get it to look right in this state.

[dendwaler]

Not shure or the next is what you mean.

To bake light the shadeless material button may not be activated!
Turn of the textures if it already was textured.
Bake a full render on a new image .

As an example i have set up 3 spotlights inside a cube.
I removed the front of the cube.

This is the bake result which can be added,mixed or multiplied with the main layer.
Then turn on again the textures and activate " shadeless" again.

[Whilyam]

Perhaps this will help? This is the output I get on a lightmap. Instead of clean shadows like normal, everything is washed out by white. You can see a little orange in there which comes from lights, but the rest is bright white.
The thing is, this happens even with NO lights in the Age at all. The only way I can get rid of it is by turning off the Ray button in the Render panel:



But this means I have no ray shadows, which is the whole goal!
I've checked all the settings I could think of and nothing seems different. The Render panel looks the same as the one for Tosholek, which uses lightmaps just perfectly.

EDIT: To show the extent of this issue, I selected one of the lightmapped objects and deleted every other object in the Age and it still washes everything out. Even with no lights in the Age, if I add a box over the lightmapped object and bake again, it will still produce that washed out look. without the box, it produces a pure white lightmap.

[Sirius]

Hmmm, did you disable ambient occlusion ? That might be the problem.
It's in the world properties panel.

By default, AO adds light (as shown in this picture). If you want to keep the ambient occlusion but prevent it from lighting up objects, you should try selecting "sub" or "both" ("sub" will subtract light, while "both" should do an average, not sure since I work in newer versions of Blender which have only Add and Multiply).

It's also worth noting you can tweak the energy, and use white AO or AO based on Blender's sky color (... which often looks great in outdoors locations).

[Whilyam]

Aha! I never knew about this setting. That's done it!