Help with Pre-Calculated Lighting for Environment Art Test

RogelioD

Hello all! Just today I received an art test from a company (that for now will go un-named) and I had a few technical questions I wanted to reach out to the community for.

I think I have a firm grasp on most of what they want, but there are a few things that I feel are slightly beyond me at this point (or just slightly above my head...within reach). One of these issues is pre-calculated lighting.

For this test, they want all of the assets and whole scene delivered in 3DS Max. I am allowed to use lights, however, all Global Illumination/Occlusion/Shadows have to be pre-calculated (I'm assuming, that means they have to be baked out.)

This is the exact wording that has me confused:

• Omnis and spots (ranged or not) can be added to the scene (without casting shadows).
• Global illumination, Shadows and occlusion, if any, must be pre-calculated and integrated in the materials following the recipe of your choice.

While I wait for my questions to be answered from the company, I figured I'd reach out to PC for some suggestions as well.

Using either Max or Maya, does anyone feel they can steer me in the right direction with this? I am very used to Game Art packages doing this for me (UDK, Unity, Etc.)

Before I start my test, I wanted to get a better feel for this so I've been on youtube all day watching tutorials and what I've come up with so far is; I know I could very easily bake all the color/light/shadows/GI right into the diffuse and not use the lights in the scene, but I'm worried I'd lose the benefit of Spec and Normal by not having the actual lights casting in the scene.

I am also having a hard time figuring out how Tilable meshes would translate into that type of workflow. (I'm assuming I would have to give everything a second UV set, and cram all of the UV's of that second set into one texture for the lightmap... but I'm not 100% on that). As of yet, I have not found a way to purely bake out a light-map with just light/shadow/GI information (ala UDK) and I'm not sure how I would apply it to my material in Max once it was actually baked out.

Other than the pre-baked lighting, I am fully okay with all of the other limits presented to me. And I want to re-assure everyone that I have been doing research on this all day and I'm not being completely lazy- This community is amazing and I know there are a ton of you that have used this work flow and can share some really great insight here. I'll continue to search this wiki and go through youtube, but feedback here would be really really helpful.

Thanks so much for your time.

m4dcow

This link might help with how to bake lightmaps in Maya.
http://davegoosem.net/blog/maya/texturing-maya/baking-lighting-into-a-texture-in-maya/

RogelioD

That certainly helps @m4dcow ! Thanks much!

o2car

I would use turtle (be

RogelioD

Thanks o2car, I'll be doing quite a bit of pre-pro today and I'll look into that for sure!

RogelioD

Actually, o2car- would you be able to point me in the right direction as far as displaying those maps in Maya? I feel like if I knew the principal of it, I could reverse engineer it into max or something like that. If you got a few free minutes today I'd appreciate any help I can get.

RogelioD

So, just a quick update. I fully learned how to bake some great Lightmaps with GI and Final Gather out of maya. I discovered how to (in Max) create a DirectX shader with Diffuse and Lightmap support- however, I can't figure out if there is a shader out there that has Lightmap support AND Spec and Normal map support. At this point, with only a budget of only 6 textures and 4096 combined pixels, I almost feel like it's not worth having spec and normal-especially with it being day scene. I've been stressing about this for two days now and I just don't know which way to go. And now that my modeling is almost done, I need to decide soon so I can anticipate the way to UV my meshes. UGH, restrictions can be fun, but they can also be such a pain T_T

Eric Chadwick

Directional lightmapping, try this Max shader. He has links in the Resources part for baking directional maps.
http://www.aurelm.com/envo/

Yes you do need a 2nd UV set (on everything that gets lightmapped).

After baking, decide which lights will be dynamic, and attenuate those. This will give you some dynamic specular and illumination.

More shaders here
http://wiki.polycount.com/CategoryShaders

o2car

I got viewport shaders straight from the guy who wrote turle and be

o2car

Here is a screengrab from Maya viewport of the radiosity normalmaps (Directional lightmaps)

If people are interested I can ask the guy who wrote it if its okey to share it somehow.