Lighting tech

tyk

http://www.cybergooch.com/tutorials/pages/lighting_rfom4.htm

i found this link
it's really interesting
i know how to bake the light into the diffuse map
but the problem its gonna be so large
how can i make that light map?

Joshua Stubbles

Pretty old article iirc - someone posted it after the postmortem last year I believe. In any case, it's not that hard though. Your environment has to be broken up into smaller pieces anyways, for stuff like PVS. So you have a texture per-section. Not one texture for the whole world. You can do that on PC of course (ie; Quake Wars) but that's not quite as doable on consoles still.

tyk

i know that
my question is
where do i bake the light?

Eric Chadwick

Depends on what software you are using.

tyk

i'd like to know how the light map and emissive map look
im using modo... and i even know how to use max, maya, xsi, lightwave, cinema and some other i know photoshop pretty good
what im trying it's to achieve a realtime scene that look as good as the newest game fps
i need some more information... i've been looking around...
but all i found it's too old not really usefull

Eric Chadwick

It depends on the game engine. The lighting tech in RFOM is basically that they bake the lighting into a special kind of normal map that stores the lighting directions. Then the regular tiled normal maps use this special lighting normalmap to apply directional lighting. They also use vertex color to color the lighting, because the lighting normalmap cannot store color, only lighting direction.

Most games use simpler lightmaps, simply multiplied onto their diffuse maps. There are many ways to bake lightmaps, here's one program for it.
http://www.frecle.net/index.php?show=products&section=giles&sub=about

Do a search in these forums for lightmap and you'll get more info.