Expand boarder pixel on a lightmap without overlap in mental gay?

malcolm

So I'm wondering if anyone knows of an external tool to expand the boarder pixel of a texture, basically we have found that mental gay expands it boarder pixels on shells rather than expanding them on all shells at once. What you end up getting is the boarder pixels expand into other shells. On previous light bakers I have worked with the boarder pixel expands only until it hits another pixel and then stops. This is not the case in mental gay unless you use only one material assignment on your model. Any suggestions?

Eric Chadwick

A couple Photoshop options here...
http://boards.polycount.net/showthread.php?t=63571

glib

Space your shells better or don't pad as much?

malcolm

Not an option glib, we have lightmaps ranging from 16x16 to 1024x1024 so we found padding 5 pixels is optimal for us, but 5 pixels on a 16x16 or anything below 128x128 is a large pad. Spacing the shells out more than we currently do will result in a lot of the light map just rendering as black. Back in the day at ea I used to pad 9 pixels because in that baker the shells would stop padding when they hit another shell, I actually padded 16 pixels for a while with no overlap errors. Ideally I am looking for a batch program something fast we can use to pad after the bake rather than mental gay.

CrazyButcher

and pad depending on resolution (which is what you should do)? As for a batch program, what format do you export to? You would need something with alpha channel support so the mask isn't lost.

malcolm

Yeah padding with resolution would be great but again mental gay doesn't have support for it. We're rendering out .tga and converting to .dds so the game can read it.

malcolm

Hi Eric, that is a nifty action. This does exactly what I want but ideally it would be a light weight external app that does the work since batching thousands of lightmaps in photoshop will cost thousands of minutes.

CrazyButcher

would it be okay to export tga in that app? I can write something like that

malcolm

Yeah totally fine, we batch to .dds as a final step before the lightmaps make it in game.

Kessler

AHHAHAHAHHAHA mental gay!!!! hahahah win!

Whargoul

What if you use the bake to one map option? Is there a reason to have multiple materials on the object (since that's what's causing the problem)? Could you just assign a single material and then bake? I'm assuming not or you would have.... This does seem gay.

malcolm

Hi Cody! Yeah no can do we need to bake to seperate maps as it's the whole world we are baking and there are material breaks all over the place. Mental gay's edge padding is not good. We evaluated turtle and found the problem did not exist turtle but it was too late at that point and integrating turtle would take to long to make the switch. One day I'll report this limitation through the maya bug form.

EarthQuake

malcolm wrote: »

Not an option glib, we have lightmaps ranging from 16x16 to 1024x1024 so we found padding 5 pixels is optimal for us, but 5 pixels on a 16x16 or anything below 128x128 is a large pad. Spacing the shells out more than we currently do will result in a lot of the light map just rendering as black. Back in the day at ea I used to pad 9 pixels because in that baker the shells would stop padding when they hit another shell, I actually padded 16 pixels for a while with no overlap errors. Ideally I am looking for a batch program something fast we can use to pad after the bake rather than mental gay.

The xnormal photoshop plugin will stop padding when it hits another pad. So higher padding always = better. You could probabbly set up an action and then batch it.

malcolm

Probably can't got the xnormal route either given batches in photoshop are mega slow. I'll check it out though.

Eric Chadwick

The action I made is super-slow, I'd suggest using Xnormal's filter instead. Batches aren't bad in PS, it does a decent job. Thousands of minutes is fine, just let it run on a dedicated box for a day or so.

malcolm

One of the stipulations of the edge padding is it needs to do about 1000 lightmaps in about 2 minutes.

EarthQuake

I think you'de be hard pressed to find any app that can load and save 1000 images in 2 minutes, let alone do any sort of post processing on them. =D

CrazyButcher

if you are willing to "donate", I can write a gpu powered batch application doing it. Probably a days work. 2 minutes is unrealistic due to file reading/writing speeds.

malcolm

CrazyButcher, how much? Also this would be for a production game so you'd have to sign all the rights away to us. Or if you could point me to some examples that would be great we could have our tech artist do it just not sure where he should start.

CrazyButcher

moving this to PMs