This is a basketball level I finished recently. It's around 10k total polys in the scene. About 80 textures totalling 9.5 megs, not bigger than 256x256. There are 2 512x512 lightmaps in the scene. One on the ground and the other on the orange brick building. I used Mental Ray to create the lightmaps.
yeah I was thinking it was a little odd the trunks were so dark, turns out it was a lightmap error and the bark colour was a bit dark for the sun position, just replaced the lightmaps so that should clear up some of the issue.
In everything else I've used you just slam the lightmap (AO in this case) on a second map channel. I don't know how this is done in UDK, I'm assuming it looks for multiple map channels if you're using lightmaps?
I have to say I do somewhat enjoy having lightmaps. Compression artifacts often give that subtle dirty look, while low res lightmaps sometimes produce happy accidents and create some cool gradients.
one of our coders said, that most new engines bake three lightmaps(for every normal direction), so that the shading doesn't get weakened but supported by the lightmap.. You should try it (don't know how though) :D
I just upgraded an old project to unity 5 and i'm unable to bake lightmaps to a skinned mesh renderer (in this case an animated door leading outside) In unity 4 i'd just set the object to static before baking then turn off after i've got my lightmap, is this not possible anymore with enlighten?!
You can set your lightmap uv's channel inside UDK. In the static mesh editor there is the Lightmap Co-ordinate index. For a map with 2 UVs it will have the options of channel 0 and 1 ; 0 being the 1st map and 1 being the 2nd :)
peanut: Glad I could help. Jovian started as a plugin for LightWave, then became standalone (which is when I bought it), then was bought by NewTek and integrated into LightWave/killed as a standalone. It's a shame. But one day I'll make a better one, in a couple of years or so...
Not too many changes today, because I spent around 2 days and did hundreds of lightmap rebuilds by experimenting with lightmass settings and UV for lightmaps. Still have some issues, but now I know how to fix them.
We do that on airborn too, not that it makes it any standard then, i just wanted to collaborate our experience with that topic. We have only a few master shaders, basicly not only one because the env uses lightmaps and the dynamic objects don't use lightmaps, besides that we only have a few more shaders that are very…