"The Cathedral" another building project

[dendwaler]

Still a lot to do, but its time to show some sneak peeks from upper galary's.

[janaba]

Wow!!! What a mighty progress, very impressive and majestic, thanks, dendwaler ...

[Dulcamara]

You are a great artist Dendwaler.
I bow to you.

[Whilyam]

Looks very promising. What are you using to do lighting in the Age? I did a concise tutorial on lightmapping that I think the area could benefit from. Opens up a lot of possibilities in terms of what you can do with lighting.

[dendwaler]

I did a concise tutorial on lightmapping that I think the area could benefit from.

Ok Whil, i found your tut.
In a glance i do not see anything in it, i don't use.
But if there is i will let you know.
I think its very good you made this., Lightning is a difficult task.

One thing can be done better , it has to do with the UV lightmap.
I never use it the way you described because you will get black lines around many faces on unwanted places.

Instead of that i advise to always do a proper UV map.
Most of the time this has already been done for the main layer.
Then make a new layer while being in object mode.
The new layer will have exact the same layout as the upper one.
Then in edit mode , inside the UV image editor make a new image.
Select all vertices in the editor.
Press in the UV image editor " Ctrl A" to average the island scale
Then press " Ctrl P " in order to pack all islands in optimal format inside the new image.
Now (after Baking) you wont have any annoying black lines because they follow the edges off your mapping.
When some islands are still to small , select them and scale them a bit bigger.
..and press "Crtl P" to pack them again in their new format.
Bake ambient occlusion or lightmap on this image like i explained .

Try it, and you will notice this is way better!!!
After a while this becomes second nature for every object.

Ps, if i have an object ready i will send it to you, but it has no priority for me, i work very hard on the cathedral, it has to be finished before end of year season.

[Whilyam]

I tried this on Fens, but it makes it have worse issues. The way I describe makes it smooth. It'll probably work for people in other circumstances. That's why I made the tutorial, these are the things that work best for me.

[dendwaler]

Ok, strange.
The only thing can can imagine is that you did not use the edge split modifier combined with the smooth button .
If you did not, then the light has the mean value for a whole face instead of the pixel value.

[Whilyam]

Excellent! Thank you! Although, it looks like the "set smooth" button does the trick on its own.
Do you happen to know if there's a way to increase the quality of ray-traced shadows without increasing the texture size? I imagine there is not.

[dendwaler]

Somewhere sirius did post a few examples, i have to search for it.
The answer is use blur! To get rid of scharp shadows.
Still its a lot of work if you have lot of objects.
Blender 2.7 is doing a lot better.

So i build in 2.49 and append the object in 2.7 to do Ao and shadows .
Save the images and apply those images in 2.49.

[Sirius]

You might be looking for this.

Yes, the best answer is to either blur the image with an editing software, or render to something like 4x resolution and then downscale it.
You can also set a very high soft size in the lamp's shadow settings, the shadow will look a lot less sharp, which will reduce pixel aliasing (beware though, with sun object the soft size is linked to the Age's size).