Guild of Writers

I posted 2 new tutorials for Max and Cyan's plugin:

Light Maps: http://dusty.homeunix.net/wiki/Light_Maps_in_Max

and Sprites and Billboards: http://dusty.homeunix.net/wiki/Sprites_ ... rds_in_Max

Yay Andy!

Good to see these up. Always helpful to have them in one place.

I sent Andy an email regarding the lightmap tutorial.

I'm not sure why the extra settings for the light (Making sure in shadow parameters that map is checked, or setting the correct texture size in the shadow map parameters rollout) is needed.

Without these the lightmap comes out the same in Uru regardless, and the render in Max comes out the same regardless. These seem to just be empty additional steps that aren't needed. However since Nye and Andy both worked on this maybe they could shed some light so to speak on why these steps are there.

Oh I'll take the easy way out on this one:

: Points finger at Nye: 'Cause he said to do it!

Actually I simply did it as Nye said he did it too, and it worked. I never thought to remove the check marks and see if it still worked that way (I tend to assume if someone says to do something there was a good reason for it at the time). Instead I did it his way, saw that it worked and quickly wrote up a tutorial for it.

I only asked cause when I converted ChloesHoodOffice and EderLicinius to Max awhile back I had to redo the lightmaps, and I just used the lightmap component and set a new UVLayer for the object. The lightmap came out fine, so after reading through the tutorial I was curious as to what the extra steps for were. It occured to me that maybe it was for rendering to see how it would look in Max. But when i tried it I realized that it was the same no matter what way it was set.

More than likely it's needed for actual high resolution renders for pics and animations exported by Max itself, as with those you would not be able to use the Lightmap plasma component since you'd be making images or movies with just Max and not Plasma. I'll edit the tutorial and remove those steps when I get a chance later.