3dsMax Help

[DarkFact]

You're welcome and your level's looking great.

[excaliber]

So I decided to check how my lightmaps looked in TV3D (the previous screenshots were 3DS renders).  My textures and normal maps loaded fine in ModelView, but when I applied the lightmap I generated, it merely tiled across the entire model and looked ridiculous.

The lightmap was generated by "Render to Texture" and saved as a jpg file.  Any ideas or suggestions?

[DarkFact]

You can't use normal maps and lightmaps at the same time. They both use stage 1. When you put it in modelview, and changed the lighting mode to Bumpmapping TangenSpace, it made the lightmap tile.

The only way at this point to combine lightmaps and normal maps at the same time is with shaders. That is what my team is spending so much time on right now. It's been done before, search for Zak's example.

[excaliber]

Ahh, thanks for that clarification.  From a theory point of view, I guess it does make sense why they can't be combined without a shader.  I guess they could be baked into the colormap itself but that sounds terribly inflexible and a huge hassle.  I'll just put it aside until I have time to learn more shader stuff.

[JukkaKevät]

Yes, well you can't derive light direction from mere shadow/lightmap. Using normal maps would be kind of a waste.

The Zaknafein's example shows usage of three lightmaps from which you can calculate lights direction for any given point in surface.

[sybixsus]

Ahh, thanks for that clarification.  From a theory point of view, I guess it does make sense why they can't be combined without a shader.  I guess they could be baked into the colormap itself but that sounds terribly inflexible and a huge hassle.  I'll just put it aside until I have time to learn more shader stuff.

Moreover, you would be causing two major problems. Firstly, you would end up needing many different copies of the same texture because the lightmap would make them all different. This would use up a lot of diskspace and texture memory. Secondly, you wouldn't be able to tile your textures as you would not want to tile the lightmap which was baked into it.

A good, unified lighting system is very hard to come by, I'm afraid.