Hi! These are my first experiences with shadow and texture baking in Blender. I'm doing fine so far.

Shadow baking is great because you can get a more sophisticated shading than with A7 compiler, but I can find some problems right away.

For instance, 3dgs does an excellent job by lighting the entities after the shadowmap/lightmap on the floor it stands ((in A7 this has noble name of PRV - Precomputed radiance Volumes. Every entity gets its radiance color value from the nearest radiance plane below its origin) as in this picture:


Question is, how can I have something like PRV with generated shadows in meshes? as to avoid this:




I know there are people with years of experience baking shadows. Any solution you care to share? Or... maybe the engine supports some kind of separated lightmap for imported geometry?

Thanks!

Emilio

the trick is to trace from the player to the object beneath him/her, get the ambient value and apply it to your model, I think if you look up c_trace it tells you what the trace returns.
BTW: I have not forgotten about my baking tutorial....just busy ATM..

-Justin

Hi

Is not c_trace slow?

Conitec should help with this! don't you think?

I was hoping a better solution that wasn't overcoming the whole lighting process manually, using c_trace and doing my own entity lighting. Well, it's a solution, but I hope there's something more engine-wise.

..maybe a second set of coordinates that could be replace the 'radiance maps' in arbitrary geometry. Or maybe a lightmap that is generated but not displayed on the geometry. I was hoping something like that existed already. Maybe people at Conitec already have a solution for this...

Emilio

What's wrong with using the c_trace?
You are tracing to handle the gravity anyway!

If your entity is above an entity the trace returns "you" for the entity.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I would write something like this after the trace instruction:
if(you != 0)
{
my.ambient = you.ambient;
}

From the manual:
"
you If the obstacle was an entity, the you pointer is set to that entity; otherwise it's set to NULL
"
online manual

fade it into the you's.ambient value(makes the transition smooth) using some testing, and c_trace is only slow if many ents. are doing it, and at what length the trace is.

the ambient value is the same for the whole entity. you have to get the texture's pixel colour. if c_trace with SCAN_TEXTURE can't do the job for entities (i'm not sure here) you should try a view with size 1x1 pointing downwards and reading the texture information via bitmap instructions.

correct, but you can read the lighting on bsp levels I think.

Sorry, I missinterpreted what I saw on the last screenshot. I thought the bright model stood _on_ a dark entity. Now, I see it is standing in the shadow of a block or something! Sorry, for the confusion!

Yeah, the character is standing on a dark BAKED shadow.
I don't think it should be correct to read the texture color in this case. A dark or light floor doesn't necessarily mean a light or a shadow.

Unless I take the next c_trace, making sure it's a block and not arbitrary geometry (can this be done?). But even if it's possible, I'd have to reproduce the lights using blocks in WED.

I have heard of a second set of uv coordinates in MED, and soon in the engine. I wonder what can be done with them.

EDIT: I should have read the beta log more carefully:



I assume a solution is underway.