Quote:
Originally Posted by lordfly
Ah, that makes sense, yes. You'll have to forgive me, my modeling knowledge is sadly limited to "things Second Life can do". In my mind, a texture is a texture is a texture, shadows baked on or not.  SL can only have a single texture applied to a surface (not even a material, just a jpg or tga); that's why I was hoping for an easy way to plop a light up in the sky and have it "bake" the shadows into the texture map. Alas, modeling is never that easy. |
Ah, yeah, I understand that. SL is the reason I have the combiner feature in there. For all the nifty things it does, its graphics are pretty primitive in a lot of ways.
The good news is that sculpties already meet the texturing requirements. Anything that is a sculpty can have a lightmap rendered without needing to change the UV map.
Incidentally, if you really need the texture resolution you can fake multipass in SL with two prims as long as your prim does not use alpha mapping. (otherwise you will get z-sort errors.) Create your prim, then create a second ever-so-slightly larger version. I recommend using the displacement mapper to make the slightly bigger one. Place both in the same spot, and put the lightmap on the larger prim. Make sure to convert your lightmap to an alpha map first by creating an all-black texture in your paint program, then importing the lightmap into the alpha channel. Set the repeat on the lightmapped prim to 1, and set the repeat on your "detail" prim to whatever you like. I know it's cheesy, but it works better than you'd think. A lot of the furniture artists do this for ground shadows. If you go to the Avnet museum, there are shadows all over the place in there that are done this way.
Otherwise, the simple answer is to use a larger texture. I know, not ideal, but it gets the job done until we get real UV mapping and poly models in SL which will let people build objects a lot more memory efficiently.