hmm, never tried modo, but I got started in Lightwave and LOVED how quick it was to do everything. . . I miss it ;( I'll have to give Modo a try after that.
Everything is real-time, all you need to do is bring up the Time Of Day editor and mess around with the parameters and see it updating in real-time. There's no lightmaps in CryEngine.
Isn't it just showing you UV1, instead of UV0? That's a strange thing about Unreal, it shows you the UV channel the lightmap is set to. In UDK that defaults to the second channel.
Atlasing is usually for hero models and props. Also useful for lightmaps. You may not need either. But most games use a mix of atlases and tiling, so that would be 2 uv channels.
The four rooms from the first environment of our alpha build are almost complete ! The textures and the lights need a bit of work, and the lightmap could be better but quiet happy with the somewhat intricate result !
Ah, interesting, I'll keep that in mind from now on then. I've always been a bit confused at to a good work flow for it, considering getting a good lightmap can take some time.
Render small for setup, bigger for final. The new resolution means the lightmap has a thousand times more pixel compared to the old one, so the increase in rendertime doesn't look that bad.