Will a vert lit model made in max go to maya????

Josh_Singh

Hey guys, Im having big trauma. I cant get the vert lighting in Maya to look the way I want it to. Im trying to bake lights into the verts.
So I get my lighting exactly the way I want it, then I go to edit poly/colors/prelight(maya software) and It looks like butt when it finishes baking. Ive tried the prelight(mentalray) and that looks even worse.
Im wondering if I can take it into max (where what you see is what you get) and could vert light it there, then bring it back to maya, (cause all our game exporters are in maya)

DOES ANYONE HAVE ANY IDEAS!!!!!PLEASE!!! HELPPPPpppPpPp!!

FatAssasin

That sounds like a custom job for a programmer. I don't know of any tools or formats that save out vertex color. I'd make nice with the engineers and try get one to help you out.

malcolm

If you want to preview what the baked vertex lighting will look like in Maya, get a copy of Maya 6 and turn on hi quality rendering, then open up the options and turn on low quality lighting, this will show you exactly how all the lights in your scene will effect the model after you burn them down to the vertices. Not really sure why you would ever want to light a character with vertex lighting though?

Josh_Singh

no not for a character, an environment. Thanks for the tip. I let you know how it turns out.

malcolm

ghost_rider, I see, yes this is a problem in every package as far as I know due to the nature of vertex lighting. Mostly it looks like crap when you bake because when you do a render the lighting is applied to the surfaces as if they had a million vertices in them, when you burn the vertex colours it has to approximate based on how many vertices you actually have in your polygon surface, therefore you are almost always left with a shit looking result, shadows are a huge problem as well causing all types of black areas. Also you have to watch out for double bright as this is also limited by vertex colour, you can only go as bright as your texture, unless your game engine supports 0-2 vertex colours as some do, this makes it hard to tune though if Maya doesn't support 0-2 brightness there would be no way to actually see the result. As a general suggestion if you are not allowed to use any light maps what so ever and you don't have enough texture space to map your textures in the 0-1 range than use Maya to burn your first pass of vertex colours and then go back in and hand tweak all the lighting and cut the shadows in where you want them and hand colour them.

Josh_Singh

Malcom, your a good man. This is exacly what im doing. One of the guys around here wrote a blur verts script which kicks ass, so that helps. So I do my directional and ambient light, bake it in, blur it, then go in an paint up my individual lights by hand,