Are you a max user? If so you will definitely want to check out this tutorial by luke(Indiglow)over at http://www.indiglow.co.uk

The tutorial is very well written and focuses on the render to texture tool in max

Direct Link: http://www.indiglow.co.uk/e107_plugins/content/content.php?cat.33

Thanks for the link! Render to texture is very powerful...
Heres a museum I'm working on, using Global illumination in max, then rendere to texture...

Render to texture example

For us, being able to bake to texture, generating diffuse maps as well as specular and normal maps, cuts our development time down a great deal, and produces some far more accurate skins, especially for use with modern shaders.

As Drew points out, you can create some pretty realistic scenes, such as the Museum, without having to use complex realtime dynamic lighting sulutions.

Hope people find it helpful

Does anyone have a 3ds max tutorial for render to texture for level designs? - EG. for rooms and buildings etc?

Cheers

Static

Its just a case of breaking up your level parts.

For example a simple room could be baked to one 1024x1024 texture, however it would probably be best to break them up into more parts. For example floor, walls, ceileng etc.

Another thing worth thinking about is for level geometry that is not moving, to use 'World' instead of 'Tangent' for your mapping. Essentially tangent works from the normal of a surface, so that if the surface rotates, the GPU can work out the new position, however if its not going to rotate, 'World' has a much better result. Certainly worth experimenting with.

So you should be able to follow the tutorial and use it for levels in the same way that you do models. The indiMECH is made up of about 6 parts, each with their own diffuse, normal & specular maps, which are then put together in engine. This is the same for levels etc.

Just as Drew has done above

Hope that helps

Hi good work drew, I want to know how to use a referance picture in med or blender or truespace, if I have the referance picture could I just make vertexes of corner points on the object in the image that I want to make, for example like a car, if I have a referance picture of the side of a car would it be possible for me to just put vertexes on the picture and connect the vertexes and then expand the model to make it look like the car in the picture, I have seen people use these techneaks, but I don't know what software they use, and I want to use this techneak to make my 3d models and then use real pictures of the car as a skin of the car.
Thanks for your time.

thanks

I've never used reference images really...straight up modelling...i know there are apps like photomodeller...