Tsar Hoikas wrote:I'm going to be looking into changing them over to RLE maps for 0.09
Wow, didn't even know this could be used for textures. Sounds okay I guess.
J'Kla wrote:If you are suggesting something like a buffer of stuff you have already baked for export that sounds like a good deal
Exactly. It's used pretty often by modern engines. If you ever saw some Unreal screenshots, that's why the engine nags you about "Lighting needs to be rebuilt".
Chacal wrote:2- lighting you avatar: place some lights for this, don't use them for baking (deactivate them before baking. It helps if you put them all in one layer). Make them sun lights for better performance.
Even better: put them in a light group that's not used by any material. This is MUCH more convenient.
And keep in mind objects without a "Bake Lighting" modifier can still receive light too (it's preferable for moving objects, although Plasma lighting is a bit tricky).
Christian Walther wrote:This can be done with soft volumes. At least it could in POTS. I have no idea how to do it with Korman, but there is documentation.
Soft volumes are a bit of a pain to setup, though. Personally I'd recommend to setup lighting so it's baked correctly, and worry about the avatar last. It's not too bad if the avatar's lighting doesn't match the rest of the scene IMHO (although that also comes from playing exclusively in first person view).
Christian Walther wrote:The soft volume approach does not do that. It could be done by having the walls cast realtime shadows, or maybe with a projection light.
I usually recommend to NOT use dynamic shadows in your Age for anything else than kickables (and even those can do without). They are that bad. They don't even match the intensity of the light source, fade weirdly with distance, and are horrible on the performances.
As you can guess I've spent so much time trying to get dynamic lighting in Plasma to behave in a somewhat sensible manner that I'd now rather avoid it entirely and rely only on baked lighting... Even though I still have trouble getting Blender to bake things correctly too
(Unity spoiled me when it comes to scene lighting. Dynamic per pixel lighting with good looking shadows and realtime GI is so cool and easy to setup, especially when combined with HDR and stuff...)