A.Russell's method will only work in environemnts with low poly counts. It's hard to imagine the hit on your speed duplicating your entire environments.

Vent's right about Max having lightmaps which are not connected, and possibly higher verts than the original texture. If anyone has the knowledge to write such a lightmapping tool which would work with these lightmaps, i'd be willing too pay for it. Send a PM if you have the knowledge to go about such a task. Since I know very little about d3d, and writing a plugin(nevermind the time investment) myself. Infact, I bet theres more than a few users who'd be willing to pay for such a tool. Afterall, as more and more users become experienced and use models for their levels, the lightmapping need will be even more apparent.

what's "a.russell's method"? it was just an example i think. you can't use the two models like that.

what you theoretically could do is putting a shadow map into the alpha channel of a duplicated model and let it render over everything. do you mean something like that? it wouldn't really be a light map though but only a shadow map. i tried this once and it was fast enough even with a 50000 poly world. i think the reason it is fast enough is that the z-buffer is already filled after rendering the non-transparent geometry and then only the visible shadow geometry pixels have to be drawn.

Well all this talk of lightmaps.. lightmaps are just so boring

Hi Matt, how about you add it to sphere? I'm sure you could do it much more quickly than Conitec.

Yes, what I posted above is an example. I don't know how the the lightmap would actually be implimented. I posted it in case it was useful as a test model for anyone who did.

lol, yeah, they arn't that flashy but still add alot to a scene(which would otherwise be even more dull). It would be awsome if you'd add something like this for Sphere? If your intrested, please send me a PM and I can help compensate you for your efforts.

p.s - the reason I cannot use per-pixel lighting is due to the size and scope of the game. Between the A.I, weapons, and large level environments, per-pixel would bog down a fast racing environment just too much. Nevermind getting a good scene managaer to manage all the dynamic lights properly across an large area.

I'd take good lighting over the coolest bloom shading effects.. it's so important and overlooked.

From the GILE[s] forum:

Quote:

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Yes, it's different from engine to engine. In most cases you can load both files, and then copy the vertex coordinates from the lightmapped model to the textured model (to a different texture coordinate set), and then apply the lightmap to the textured model.

The lightmapped model and the textured model are identical, except for the texture coordinates and which textures are applied to them.

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Aw thats what I thought is the appeal of sphere, filling in all the gaps of what A6 lacks. Though it would probably be faster implemented outside of Sphere, it looks better but is a bit slower, right?