3ds Max Lightmaps

nevets2001uk

I'm quite new to 3ds Max and have been experimenting with a few concepts to learn some techniques I'll need for creating a game environment. I wanted to test creating a lightmap on UV channel 2 so I followed these basic steps...

Created a plane and some boxes
Created 2 colours lights - turned on cast shadows
Attached the geometry together
Applied an unwrap modifier for UV channel 2
Flatten mapped the objects
I then changed to mental ray renderer and started a render to texture
I rendered out a 512 lightmap to a tga file

This all seems to go well and I have a lightmap which looks correct. I then wanted to test it inside Max. I added the lightmap to the self illumination of a new material, turned off the lights and did a test render.

It does seem to render with shadows, however there is no colour information which I was expecting to see. In the viewport you see the colours but not in the render.

Am I doing something wrong in my workflow?

r_fletch_r

start a new material. put your lightmap into the diffuse slot and check the 'colour' check box under self illumination. then set the colour to white.

Mark Dygert

You might need to set the diffuse material to use the 2nd UV channel?

nevets2001uk

Thanks. Didn't realise it could go in there. What about the texture I have in the diffuse slot of the material already?

r_fletch_r

in that case use the illumination map slot and make sure colour is on. that should work. if not put it in a composite map, increase the output of the light map (in the bitmap node) and multiply it over the diffuse texture. an output of 2 to 4 should do.