Need help with max lightmaps

Mime

I'm trying to bake my lightmaps using 3ds max.
I have a pretty complex scene, about 150 objects.

I unwrapped all of them with an automatic unwrapper , which i have set to channel 2.

Now my question is how do i combine the resulting 150 lighmaps, fast and easy but more importantly HOW DO I GET THEM TO SHOW UP IN THE VIEWPORT ?
I need to have one lightmap for the entire scene.
I could make individual materials for each object, but that seems like the wrong way to go.

Need help, fast

And yes it MUST be done in 3ds max.

cw

did you auto unwrap the whole group of 150 objects onto one UV?

If so, it should be fine and you need a shader or setup a max material to combine the various textures you have in the way you want.

If not, try to do it that way~? If you have more specifics please divulge them and more detailed solutions can be offered.

I'm not sure on your exact setup/requirements so I can't be more specific than this though, sorry.

Rhinokey

one light map for the entire scene? this souds like a paaaaaiiiiinnnnn in the ass. i havent done this before,, but to me it seems like you would need to, attach all the objects as 1, then auto unwrap so none of the pieces are overlapping, then bake, then leave attached or detach,

then find a shader you like that supports light mapping and set up the material

you can bake the light maps without attaching but i think it would be a bigger pain to keep one lightmapt texture for all

cw

what rhinokey says is true also! break it down into sections and assets' worth for a much less stressful time.

divi

select all at once, apply an unwrap modifier and switch to your lightmap uv channel. arrange them all in 0-1 (sounds like not so much fun!) and bake a lighting map.
for the next part it depends on what you want to display them with. if it's something like shaderfx you can just multiply it on top of the diffuse. most of the realtime viewport shaders have a slot for a lightmap aswell.
if you want to render it or something you could play with a blend material and see if that gets you what you want. no 100% sure on that since ive never needed something like that

edit: wow i shouldnt take so long for writing my answers

Mime

I'm doing this for an art test , so i have to have 256 textures for my assets, so i had to split them in a few parts , therefore the number of individual objects sky-rocketed . And yes i did unwrap them all together.

Also i must present them in a .max file.

I think i will merge and break everything and see what that does to help me. Thanks Rhinokey.
A lot of my objects are instances , i should make them unique and keep them that way so each one has different channel 2 UV's , right ?

Edit:

i want to use xoliul' shader , which now supports lightmaps. For this i will be eternally grateful.

cw

also check out the previous infos:

http://boards.polycount.net/showthread.php?t=72455

good luck dude!

Mime

So i merged them all together , but then i realised i can't bake gi from textures now. sigh..
Thanks cw and divi for the help. will keep you posted if i ever manage get a decent result.

r_fletch_r

Mime wrote: »

So i merged them all together , but then i realised i can't bake gi from textures now. sigh..

If your using MR try making sure the meshes are closed. We did some lightmapping with MR at work a while ago and it refused to bake open meshes. we used a cap holes modifier and moved the caps off the main UV tile. worked fine after that.

We also had some issues with totally white or black maps. We found rendering them with a 32bit frame buffer and as .HDR files we could set the exposure iin photoshop. Im sure theres a better workflow but its worth being aware of

Xoliul

You, or the people viewing your art test might get some heavy performance problems with a 150-object scene with shaders applied to everything. A high number of objects is a real performance killer in Max, combining them might make things a lot smoother to work with.

Mime

Your shader ( for which i am forever grateful ) is applied to about 150 objects , but i have about 30 maps and on my old athlon dualcore , with 1g ram and 7600 gt, i get about 10-15 fps. Which is still very workable. (BTW can i send your shader with my scene ? )

Finish up my scene just now.

And i must THANK YOU all for the great support , shaders, plugins and whatnot .
I could NOT have done it whithout you guys.
You are ALL that AWESOME.

Xoliul

That's pretty good, you probably aren't turning on a lot of options. I think when i got slowdowns with lots of objects Iw as also using the realtime shadows which are much heavier. And I don't mind you sending the shader, my site and email is in it anyway. Just make sure you get the asset tracking right, or they'll get to see nothing.