Baking Vertex Lighting in XSI

David Somers

Shout out to fellow XSI goers over here. I'm working on some assets for a dated engine that doesn't have fantastic lighting. So I've been trying to figure out any kinds of ways I can tweak the lighting per object.

I'm applying illuminated decals (for direct light coverage) but for this engine, I need to also shade in the darker unlit areas to achieve a semi-realistic look. I've been trying to manually paint Vertex colors on the models which has produced some interesting results. Although XSI's vertex painting isn't entirely helpful for low resolution geometry. I had heard of some methods for a bake process that samples lights in the scene and saves it into the vertex data. Though when I was looking this up I hadn't much luck in finding any resources relating to accomplishing that in XSI.

Is there a plausible method for making this work, other than manually painting it?

Ashaman73

I don't know XSI, but in blender you can bake AO etc. directly to the vertex color. Blender is free and you can export/import your model between blender/XSI and test it out. But my experiences with automatic baking of vertex color is, that the quality depends on the vertex distribution. I got decent results with 1.5k - 3k models, but you need to manually paint it afterwards. I fear, that a low vertex distribution will result in bad result, best to test it out first.

cryrid

Rendermap will do it.

Set the sampling to 'Vertices Only', and surface type to your Vertex_Color. You probably want to bake the Illumination Only option if you're just doing light maps.

David Somers

cryrid wrote: »

Rendermap will do it.

Set the sampling to 'Vertices Only', and surface type to your Vertex_Color. You probably want to bake the Illumination Only option if you're just doing light maps.

I was looking under all the other Rendermap tabs and must have missed that. I setup some lights trying this method but it gives me this error...

ERROR : Invalid CAV found while regenerating RenderMap. Generation will be skipped for Colour.

It is doing something though, as there are some highlights showing up on the vertex colors. Only thing most of the mesh is near black and it's not really accepting any higher light values (none that are making a difference anyway).

cryrid

What does your Rendermap PPG look like? Is it set to the right CAV property if you have more than one?