Lightning for Plasma using Blender

[dendwaler]

A while ago I found something with may be worth to share.

In Blender making good lightmaps can be a pain.
So most of us choose to use vertex painting instead.

I discovered that it is possible to use the normals as lightning source much easyer.

Included in this post are 4 pics.
The first is a simple scene with a cube.
The cube is textured and shadeless

After unwrapping the cube, bake the normals on a new image, be sure there is no overlap in faces.
It can be very small , in most cases 128 or 256 pixels will do.
Save that image , it looks as in picture 2.

Then convert this image to grey in an external program.

Load that coverted picture in a new layer. (In most cases it is better to use a new new uv layer for it as well.)

Multiply this layer with the first layer.

The result of the cube after the export to Plasma, can be seen in the last picture.

It is nicely lightened now.
Finally I am able to get rid of all those flat looking objects.
This works in all cases.

I hope you find this information usefull.

[Calena]

I tested it and it worked like a charm . I've been baking Amb Occ, which helps, but this is much better to shade objects without altering the basic color scheme. I like it! Thanks dendwaler. Now I have to go back and change a bunch of stuff. I guess it's a good thing we Blender builders appear to now have an extremely long wait before we can hope to build for MOUL.

In return, I've learned how to turn lights on and off. The method I used for the journey cloths in my last age also works to not only turn lights on and off, you can make entire scenes disappear and be replaced instantly . It does take some thinking things through. My son is taking me into some wild stuff . Fun for the whole family.

[dendwaler]

Glad you can confirm this Calena,

I believe that this trick is only necessary because PyPRP does not support the normals by default.
This is a work around for something that should have been integrated .
It is not a replacement for shadow baking nor for Ao baking, its an addition to it.

I will test how this technic will work in combination with the UV subdivide modifier.
If you bake the normals subdivided then they will become much more detailed.

If they are applied then afterwards on the low poly mesh without the modifier, it might come close to bumpmapping.

that would be great!

[Jogi]

I've just started in Age building and I am still in the state testing things out.

For lightning I have found another interesting approach using the radiosity renderer in blender without altering the original mesh:

(Important: From "Radio Tools" use "Add new Meshes", not "Replace Meshes"!)
This new mesh which you get from the radiosity renderer occupies the same space as your original mesh/meshes, right? So you can do a special BAKE:
"Selected to Active" with "Full Render".

Therewith your original texture which also is held by the new mesh gets back to your original mesh with all these new light data stored in the vertex colours of the radiosity rendered mesh, even shadow data.

And a big advantage: You can use emitting materials for light production!

When you have finished in providing all your original meshes with this way, you can delete this big new mesh!

Because of possibly appearing problems please do not bother me, I am just a newcomer and still I have not tested things to their ends, sorry.

[dendwaler]

Welcome Jogi,

Thank you for shining this new light on lightning.
I must admit that i have never tried it the way you suggest.
I will play with this in the coming days. Can it be done in Blender 2.49b in this way?
At the moment i cannot oversee what all has to be done when you have many meshes near to each other, with shadow from object 1 on object 2.
I appreciate all suggestions what might give better results as what I have done sofar.
thx again.

[Jogi]

I am working with blender 2.49a.

Yeah, this radiosity renderer can take off a lot of work. And when you bake its result into a texture you do not have to be concerned about these much too many vertices it produces.

One day I have already baked the topology of a complex model into a flat texture to get a normal map of the surface of this model. But just yesterday it was the first time I tried the same ("Selected to Active" BAKE) with a radiosity renderer result. -And it works! (so far)