@plyrs: The lighting through the window looks beautiful, maybe perhaps increase the lightmap on the wall with the chalkboard, looks a little broken up. It might be worth it! Any tips with the Alpha love? I really need nail a better texture on the alphas of that fence.
You need two UV unwraps basically, one in channel 0, one in channel 1 (and possibly another actually, for lightmapping).. note that this comes at a cost to performance - more vertices if i am not mistaken, plus your second AO texture.
hear is a seam It doesnt show up in Max with the 3point shader, the lightmap UVs are fine but its showing up when I bake lighting. I can really see it when I turn on only detailed lighting (alt+5).
my current hotkey set is a mishmash of lightwave (where I started) and maya, and I've brought some of that (what I can) to max when I use it. Thankfully since they all have similar functionality the keymaps can share a lot.
They actually added the Working Pivot stuff (it now works more like Maya / Lightwave as you give examples here) in Max 2008, so you can put the pivot anywhere dynamically without losing the object's "default" pivot info.
So you did a lightmap of 256 for the whole house? Thats too low. About the rail, just add a proper uv all around, idk what you use as a 3d tool so i cant go into specifics...
I would suggest checking this thread out : http://www.michaeldashow.com/tips_texturepainting.html I think the main problem right now is the lack of volume probably because there is no lightmap or AO baked onto the character, but the shapes are there, very promising, keep going!
Those guys did a map for UT3 back in the day with excellent lighting (VCTF-HangingGardens) - it predates lightmass and isn't really that viable an alternative as it involves importing all your lightmaps as textures and handling them manually, but it's certainly good to look at.
All right. GameRez model & UV's w/ heavy mirroring (basically everywhere except for the face, hair & headphones for some non symmetric textures): ...and the ao applied to it. What do you think? Next up will be values, lightbakes & textures.
These are some of the images im using as a reference point for the mood and look I would like to go with. As of right now im working on getting the lightmaps done and applying what textures I can reuse from my first attempt.