Question on the Light Map tut

[andylegate]

I'm trying out Nadnerb's light map tutorial, and have a question. On the lights, we are told what to set the Quad2 setting to, but not the Energy. Is this not important? Or has no effect? Or do we play around with it?

[Nadnerb]

In my tutorials, I use as few words as possible, and mean exactly what I say. If I never mentioned changing the energy, the default blender setting should yield the same results shown in the tutorial. (and if it doesn't, let me know)

Now for IMHO: The energy should stay at 1. Turning it up leads to insanity. With energy > 1, when close to the light, it will start washing out or clipping. The Quad settings change how quickly the light fades to black with distance, and I usually find this and the "Dist" setting is enough to control my lights effectively.

[andylegate]

Okay thanks.....Actually I was wondering if I should turn it down (I'm doing subdued lighting in my cavern.)

Good news though! It's WORKING! A first for me! Everytime I tired to use lightmaps before, I must have kept screwing up, because it never turned out right. Now.....I'm getting those SHADOWS I wanted, and nice spot light circles.....yippy! I've got a new toy!!!

Except of course now I'm going to want to do this all over Zephyr........delaying it's release....AGAIN.....

I'll just tell everyone it's your fault.

[Nadnerb]

excellent.

[boblishman]

... Now.....I'm getting those SHADOWS I wanted, and nice spot light circles.....yippy! I've got a new toy!!!

errr ... could you explain what you mean ... you do mean avatar shadows ... yes?

[andylegate]

No, no. I have object shadows! But....it's a cheat kinda, it still like making a shadow decal and putting it in place. When you bake the light map on the texture, it's doing a render with the light in Blender on that texture. Then you save what was made as a image file (it saves it as a .tga file).
Then you turn around and add it as another texture to your object making sure that you tell it that it's UV Mapped by the 2nd UV layer, that way it knows where to put it.

Here's a pic in Blender....as you can see, my mushroom is casting a shadow! So is the raised stone blocks along the walk way (my yellow arrows point to them). Now of course we're looking at just the light map texture here. Give me a few minutes and I'll post the exported Uru screen shot:

Show Spoiler

EDIT: Ooops! Hit a snag on the Uru screen shot: My UV maps are unwrapped different (first layer I used cubic projection to unwrap, the light map layer is Smart Projections), and when you export and link in......it don't like that! I guess both UV layers have to be unwrapped the same. Let me work on that.

[boblishman]

Ahh... I understand what you mean now ... you're making a new texture (which you use Blender to generate for you (bake) using the lights in blender to make the shadows of the objects ... D'OH ... (I thought you meant that Uru was actually casting the shadows ... ... which I thought was impossible) ... phew!

[andylegate]

And you are right, that is still impossible. hehehe. Sorry to get your hopes up like that. But yah, that's what the lightmap is for.

I'm still having to mess with it, as like I said, I don't know if I can have two or more UV layers with each one unwrapped different. Also, Nadnerb said that he only says what you need to do, but do you leave the first Texture in "Mix" in the Map To ? I would think you do .

[Nadnerb]

EDIT: Ooops! Hit a snag on the Uru screen shot: My UV maps are unwrapped different (first layer I used cubic projection to unwrap, the light map layer is Smart Projections), and when you export and link in......it don't like that! I guess both UV layers have to be unwrapped the same. Let me work on that.

You don't have to have them both unwrapped the same, in fact, they're supposed to be different. That's why you type in the name of the UV layer in the "UV" portion of the Map Input panel.

Set the image to your lightmap texture, set the "map input" to UV, and in the text box that says "UV:", type in the name of the UV layer that your texture uses. (That was important. Go read that again)

[andylegate]

I did that. Really and honestly! I have the regular texture set to UV:UVTex (as that's the default name Blender gives it), and the lightmap one set to UV:lightmap, and that is the name I gave the 2nd UV layer.

But my stone block, the first layer was unwrapped using cubic projection, and the 2nd layer was Smart Projections as you said.

When I exported and linked in, I had a block that was covered with little squares of the lightmap texture!
EDIT: like somehow the stone UV map was thrown out, and it used the lightmap image....but with the Cubic projection unwrapping.......

Don't have a screen shot I'm afraid, and I've taken it back out for now. I'm sure I still did something wrong, but I'll have to go back and take my time and look again. But not right now I'm afraid. I've got to finish several things in Zephyr as I'm going to release it to everyone in 2 days as a WIP. Mainly because after that, I will be bogged down with real life for 3 weeks, and possibly longer than that.
So as many people have been PM'ing me (and emailing me) asking me to do like I did with Camp Bravo , and like Boblishman and others do, I'm going to do a WIP release so everyone can see the changes so far.

But I REALLY want to come back to this.