UV Settings Not Holding (Fixed)

[Doobes]

Hey everyone. I've found a bit of a problem in some of my Ages that are played on computers with not-so-great graphics cards (ie all the settings are at the lowest). It seems that any UV mapping for my lightmaps looks great upon link in, but it snaps to "orco" once I move the slightest bit and tiles the lightmap in an ugly fashion. Any idea why it would be doing this? I should note that this does not happen on higher-end computers (so far anyway )

I've been exporting with the latest PyPRP 1 and Blender 2.49b.

[dendwaler]

Hm. i am not sure about this one because i never encountered it myself.
I have had similar problems however.
In my case complete wavesets disapeared on lower end graphic cards.

The latter can happen with older cards because the amount of graphic memeory is far lower then on a high end card.
It simply cannot handle all the settings within that low memory.

I can imagine your problem is a similar one.

How to solve this ?
make visual regions!
each region can make nearly full profit of the video memory to render only this visible part.

To test this keep it simple.
Make two regions .
in region 1 only some " problematic" objects.
in region 2 all the other objects .( even if they are physicly placed inside region 1 they only will be rendered when the avatar is inside region 2))
don't keep the main " world" mesh in any region.(the one one which you " walk")
Every object needs some alcscript to refer to one of those regions, like the next.

Code: Select all

Tube:
    visual:
        visregions:
          - VisRegion1


use the tool made by " Tachzusamm" and you can do test this in less then half an hour time as soon you understand how the tool works.

Give it a try and look how region 1 behaves after you did this.

Good luck!

[Doobes]

Well, the problem with that is the lightmaps that are causing trouble are the main landscape, which I can't make disappear even while inside the structures. Here's an example of what I mean:

Show Spoiler

As you can see, on the left (a high-end machine) the lightmap looks fine and stays that way throughout. This is how it also looks when a low end machine links in at first. However, once the avatar moves even the slightest bit, it "breaks" into what you see on the right. You can see how the full lightmap has pretty much abandoned the UV mapping and tiled for some reason. I've tried messing with a few settings on the lightmap texture, but nothing has worked so far. :/

Any other thoughts?

EDIT: And yes, I realize the land the avatars are standing on is off, but I haven't lightmapped that yet. WIP and all that.

[dendwaler]

Normaly a lightmap has another scaling then the main texture on the same mesh.(scaling of 1 for the whole)
That is why you need to make a second uv texture map in blender (f9) >new < texture mesh.
Give this meshmap a new name (Lightmap instead of UVtex)
activate this second map and make a proper UV map of it.
That new (second) texturemesh-map is multiplied in the second layer of the material settings.
In the map input of this second layer choose again UV instead of orco and fill in the name lightmap , standard it will still be on UVtex.
Choose multiply in the output.

In F9 set back the activation to UVtex instead of lightmap.
Now you can export it.

May be you already know what i try to tell you here, but i cannot see if you did it this way, only guess.

[Doobes]

I thank you for your help with this, dendwaler.

I have done everything as the tutorials have said. The lightmap texture is on its own UV texture map (named "Lightmap). As I said, everything looks great until lower end computers move their avatar any sort of way. It's an interesting problem to say the least, isn't it?

[dendwaler]

Ok, then i can only imagine that there are to much vertices for the lower card.
If so you must also notice some lag.

You can try to select a piece of the landscape and " part" it .
place the new parted object in a visregion.

Just for investigation of coarse.

Further i am out of ideas

When you ever find the solution please let it know.
succes.

[Calena]

Hey everyone. I've found a bit of a problem in some of my Ages that are played on computers with not-so-great graphics cards (ie all the settings are at the lowest). It seems that any UV mapping for my lightmaps looks great upon link in, but it snaps to "orco" once I move the slightest bit and tiles the lightmap in an ugly fashion. Any idea why it would be doing this? I should note that this does not happen on higher-end computers (so far anyway )

I've been exporting with the latest PyPRP 1 and Blender 2.49b.

Hi Doobes . Just an opinion, but I would say it's doing this because the graphics settings are set to lowest. Have you determined the hardware specs you're building for? That's usually a good first step. Any graphics card sold within the past 5 years or so should be able to render a simple landscape in real time with the graphics settings set to high.

[Doobes]

An update: I finally found the solution...or rather, it was found by Hoikas (thank you!).

Instead of a texture lightmap, I used the vertex painting method. It seems to only be needed on complicated meshes like landscapes, and texture lightmaps on simpler objects seem unaffected by this bug.

It's pretty easy:

- Follow the usual tutorial (http://www.guildofwriters.org/wiki/Lightmapping) until you get to the point of actually baking the lightmap. Note that you do NOT need to do another UVMap for the lightmapping.

- Go into Vertex Paint mode instead.

- Click "Paint", then "Set Shaded Vertex Colors".

- When it looks the way you want it to, set the material to "Shadeless". You'll have to turn this option off if you need to redo this.

And it's done! Fixes problems on even the crappiest of graphics cards, it seems.