Creating Point Light Maps for Dota 2 in Modo/Modo Steam

Snowstorm

Hey guys, wrote up a guide for doing point light maps in Modo. Was going to post it to polycount as part of a thread like my hair tutorial, but did it all on steam and decided to just link it here instead.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=245880776

Take a look and let me know if you've got any feedback for how I could improve it!

ChiZ

Great tutorial! There's a real lack of Modo/Modo Steam tutorials, so this is a great help.

I have a question, though. How do you prevent getting dark texture seams when using your baked maps as overlays? The black of the background always seems to bleed into my UV islands, especially when resized to 256x256 for game.

I've been resorting to carefully smudging them out using the islands as constraints, but that's obviously not a great solution. I imagine there's something you can do that I'm just missing.

Farfarer

Modo has a padding option, but the UI where you can set it isn't present in the Steam edition - I've bugged that and it will hopefully be there in the next version.

You also need an Alpha render output - Modo uses that to calculate where the padding should go. It won't pad the bake if you don't have one.

Snowstorm

Yup, you avoid that by making the padding size on your bakes larger. That creates a border around the bakes so that the parts of the image outside the UV shell don't leak in through aliasing or whatnot.

I didn't know it wasn't present in Modo Steam though.

In 701 the option is under System > Preferences...



I believe the default is 3, which is definitely too small if you bake at 1024x1024 and downsize it to 256x256.

Baddcog

the 3 default does OK in ModoSE.

I was having wicked seams once with no alpha output. Once I used it they were fine.
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Thanks a lot for this. I just haven't been happy with my bakes at all and was trying to layer a bunch of pointlight maps to get what I wanted.

I'll definitely try it soon