Lightmap Problems

[Jamey]

Hi all,


I've been working for days trying to bake lightmaps in my age, but with no avail. And to make matters worse, I have no idea what the problem is, that's why I'm here. I've been following all the instructions on the GoW wiki tutorial on lightmapping, as well as Andy Legate's lightmapping tutorial on the maintainers forums, I've tried many many times over and over again to get them to bake, but when I press the bake button when doing a full render bake, it doesn't change, it just bakes a solid black texture. I tried doing lightmapping in a brand new blend file and it actually came out alright, so I dunno what's going on now.

Has anyone else had this problem? Any help would be HIGHLY appreciated.


Thanks!

[Justintime9]

Ah... I remember when I had the problem... in fact, here's the thread that got Lightmaps working for me!
viewtopic.php?f=7&t=2061
hope that helps.

[Jamey]

I see now, I had to turn off the col and texface buttons, thx Justin! I'll let you know if I run into any more problems.

[Frits]

Sorry to break into your topic, but I have the same problems. I have done everything like the tut in GoMa from Andy;
like he said in an other topic;

1) put the lighting in that you want to help make the light map.
2) select the object that you are making a light map for.
3) Make sure "Shadeless" is NOT turned on.
4) Uncheck ANY textures you have applied to the material.
5) Click on the little edit button, and under UV Mapping (where you have your first UV Map) click on "New"
6) Click on the 2 little boxes there on the new UV Map layer. Then rename the layer (like "Lightmap")
7) Make sure all faces of the object are selected
8) In the 3D window hit the U key to unwrap, and select either Smart Projectins (Blender 2.45) or Lightmap UVpack (Blender 2.46)
9) In the box that pops up, set the Island Margin to 0.1, then click on OK.
10) in the UV Editor Window, Selecet Image>New and pick what size you want (IE 256 x 256)
11) Hit F10 to call up the Render panel and click on "Bake"

After the baking is done I have a pitch black lightmap. After saving this and putting this in the second layer of my material and export the age, you guessed it, no texture is seen only darkness......

I tried this with different settings for the lights, even with max. energy, no difference, always a black lightmap.
I must be doing something wrong, but what. I have no clue. Anyone an idea?

Regards,
Frits

[andylegate]

Okay, apparently if you have any of the buttons I point my arrow to in the Materials Panel, it will cause the Light Map not to render correctly. You need to make sure that all of these buttons are OFF. I didn't not mention that in my tutorial, as these buttons default to off when you create a new material. I guess I'll have to add it to my tutorial. I just tried this, and that's what happens.

:coughs into hand: *ahem* I would like to say however, that if you go back and look at my tutorial, the original pic I use, does show these buttons all off......*ahem*

[Frits]

It must be something else because these buttons are alll off, I never touch them and like you said, they are off by default.

Regards,
Frits

[Frits]

At last, some success. I don't know what went wrong the last time, but now I see something.

BUT......

First picture shows the unwrapped object (with smart projections), all wrong. Some parts are upside dowm, strange.....


Second picture, this is the new image;


Third picture, the lights are baked, only half the light are seen, very strange......


And the last picture showing the lights in Object mode


Now something is very wrong here I think.
Anyone an idea what happened?

Regards,
Frits

[Nadnerb]

I'm seeing something rather odd in your baked lightmap. There seem to be two copies of the 'top' surface, each getting about half of the light. (the first and second rows of the uv map) What exactly is the shape of your mesh? Do you have some duplicated faces?

[andylegate]

I tired duplicating this problem and the best I could make it look the same is what Nadnerb said: double faces on certain sides.

Normally when I make light maps for say a room or hallway, my floors, ceilings and walls are all different meshes, and each one has it's own light map.

Now that's just me, and in some cases it has caused a misalignment here or there. Once should be able to make a box with the faces facing inward and make one single light map, sure, but each face of any mesh will need to have a single face, not a duplicate one on top of it.

Now again, this only made the problem to close to what you are showing us, so it's entirely possible that there is something else wrong.

[Frits]

Thanks guys, The object is a simple box extruded three times and then removed the top and bottom faces. Maybe there has gone something wrong with the extrusion, I'll look into this and let you know.

Regards,
Frits