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Old 26th May 2010, 06:21 PM   #21
lordfly
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Default Re: PLUGIN: Render to Texture: Light Maps, Normal Maps, AO

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Originally Posted by lisa View Post
Not so. Most games that use lightmaps use two sets of UV coordinates, one for the diffuse map and one for the lightmap. These are combined at runtime using either a multitexturing shader or multipass if all you have is a fixed function renderer. e.g. GL_ARB_multitexture if you're writing something using OpenGL or SetTextureStageState if you're using DirectX. The render-to-texture plugin will allow you to bake both together in case your engine doesn't support multi-texturing, but that's not the normal way it's done. These are normally different maps.

The first set of texture coordinates is for the diffuse map, and is as you describe: overlapping as much as possible to use texture space as efficiently as possible.

The second set of texture coordinates is specific to the lightmap. It's a unique atlas, and the lightmaps are *extremely* low-resolution. It's not uncommon to pack an entire scene onto a single 1024 lightmap, or small 32x32 or 64x64 textures for individual objects. Shadows are normally a little blurry anyway, so the maps can be pretty tiny and still look great. This keeps this method pretty efficient even though it uses more UV space.

AC3D only supports a single set of texture coordinates for a model so if you're building models for a game, you'll want to create two versions of the model file and combine them in your export utility. [Multi-coordinates is definitely on my wish list :-) ] If you're fixed function, keep them as separate models and arrange it as a second pass. e.g. Render the first model as usual, then render the second model with alpha blending and a tiny z-buffer offset to blend the shadows in.
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.
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Old 26th May 2010, 09:27 PM   #22
lisa
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Default Re: PLUGIN: Render to Texture: Light Maps, Normal Maps, AO

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Originally Posted by lordfly View Post
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.
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Old 28th May 2010, 12:07 AM   #23
lordfly
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Default Re: PLUGIN: Render to Texture: Light Maps, Normal Maps, AO

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Originally Posted by lisa View Post

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.
That is exactly what I'm testing... I'm giving sculpties a complete skip and trying to learn real UV mapping and whatnot.
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Old 30th June 2010, 03:59 PM   #24
epatel
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Default Re: PLUGIN: Render to Texture: Light Maps, Normal Maps, AO

This is great! Any possibility to see it ported/compiled for Mac?
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Old 8th August 2010, 09:29 PM   #25
Dark_Horizon
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Default Re: PLUGIN: Render to Texture: Light Maps, Normal Maps, AO

Thank you for such a great plugin!

However, I am experiencing a few problems... Basically I have a model, it is textured and unwrapped, and I want to bake it with the Ambient Occlusion. My settings are like this:

Texture Width: 1024
Texture Height: 1024
Super Sampling: 3
Multiple Textures: Checked
Baking: Not Checked
Input Normal Maps: Tangent Space
Render: Ambient Occlusion (mask)

However when I press render, the program stops responding and closes. What could I be doing wrong?

P.S. I am rather new to the program, beforehand I had used mainly Blender and Sketchup.
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Old 23rd October 2010, 01:55 PM   #26
Merrie
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Question Re: PLUGIN: Render to Texture: Light Maps, Normal Maps, AO

I need a little help folks, I am making some models to sell and Im using Unity3D engine it likes the 3ds format, Unity 3D does not like any other export format at this time.

The problem is that you have to put the textures in with the model, some of my textures I do not wish to give out as I have bought them.

Can I bake or somehow set the textures so they cannot be casually taken and reused from the model file? Will the new plugin do it? And if so what settings would I use just to bake the textures?

Thank you!!
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Old 10th February 2011, 01:36 PM   #27
luuckyy
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Default Re: PLUGIN: Render to Texture: Light Maps, Normal Maps, AO

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Originally Posted by Merrie View Post
I need a little help folks, I am making some models to sell and Im using Unity3D engine it likes the 3ds format, Unity 3D does not like any other export format at this time.

The problem is that you have to put the textures in with the model, some of my textures I do not wish to give out as I have bought them.

Can I bake or somehow set the textures so they cannot be casually taken and reused from the model file? Will the new plugin do it? And if so what settings would I use just to bake the textures?

Thank you!!
Do you sell 3D models or 3D games ?

If you do sell 3D models, I don't see any easy way to "hide" the textures.
Backing them wil not help at all ; see a backed texture like multiple textures collapsed into a single one (like backing ambient occlusion into the diffuse texture map for example).

But if you do sell 3D games, then you can think of packing them.
Some tools will pack all your 3D game stuff (exe, textures, models) into a single encrypted executable file. Just search the net for that.
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Old 23rd August 2011, 10:38 AM   #28
Toronto
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Default Re: PLUGIN: Render to Texture: Light Maps, Normal Maps, AO

Does this pluggin still work with Win7_64bit and/or does it still work with the latest version of AC3D version 6.7 or 6.8 ??

I can't get this great pluggin to work.
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Old 12th October 2011, 02:47 AM   #29
capnsully
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Default Re: PLUGIN: Render to Texture: Light Maps, Normal Maps, AO

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Originally Posted by Toronto View Post
Does this pluggin still work with Win7_64bit and/or does it still work with the latest version of AC3D version 6.7 or 6.8 ??

I can't get this great pluggin to work.
As a possible purchaser of AC3D, an answer to this question is important to me too, any answers yet?

Ta

simon
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Old 12th October 2011, 08:15 AM   #30
captainpeter
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Default Re: PLUGIN: Render to Texture: Light Maps, Normal Maps, AO

Unless I'm mistaken it should be included the 6.8 release.

Here's a screenshot of its settings panel as it appears on my Mac.

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