Help.. Lighting my DC Level..

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fo0k
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Help.. Lighting my DC Level..

Post by fo0k »

I made a DC map a while back (DC_Killhouse) and it works pretty well as a close combat bloodfest. but would look a lot better with some lighting inside the building!

Would appreciate some help on that as my autounwrap attempts do not seem to be very effective :/

if you like the map, then I'm open to a collaboration to finish it off.

Download it here http://www.rccmod.com/DC_Killhouse.rar 7MB

Thanks!
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fo0k
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Re: Help.. Lighting my DC Level..

Post by fo0k »

Actually had a bit of success.. realised that 3dmax exported the lightmap as a compressed tga where it should be uncompressed.

its now actually looking pretty tidy. 16MB lightmap though.. but only one building. anyone used larger lightmaps than this in bf? my pc is high spec so its hard to know what is too big... apache?
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Apache Thunder
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Re: Help.. Lighting my DC Level..

Post by Apache Thunder »

Don't over do it with the large light maps. Try and stay below 1024x1024 when possible. Use small (128x128) or medium (256x256) on the small/simple stuff.

It will lag to hell if you got 20 + buildings with lightmaps that large. ;)

My machine isn't a monster by no means, but BF normally runs silk smooth on it. However, when I did DC Baghdad (which had 900+ statics) with large (512x512) lightmaps it produced noticeable lag when ever the objects came on screen. It lagged my step dad's older machine beyond what would be considered playable.

As for the auto unwrap, change the spacing setting to 0.015. This setting controls how close together each face segment is on the lightmap file. Generally for complex stuff, the spacing is tighter....Wait it might be 0.15 not 0.015. If your setting started at 0.3, then change to 0.15. I don't have Max open right now, so not sure where that decimal point goes. :P

Anyways once you got the spacing set right, the image isn't wasted with empty space quite as much and allows for higher detail to the faces.
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fo0k
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Re: Help.. Lighting my DC Level..

Post by fo0k »

ah ok.. yeah they were spaced a lot.
well the map basically only has one object so i should be ok with a largeish lightmap. once i have got another version put together i'll up it and people can see if theres any performance issues.
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fo0k
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Re: Help.. Lighting my DC Level..

Post by fo0k »

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHjZxDcKE60


Some success with lightmaps!

this is just a few textures and omni lights thrown around in my map but it works.. im now working on proper light placement etc and the building model. I did notice that when using close (ish) fog as you will see when I enter the big main room it gives a very spooky kind of feel with the dark lighting.

This was an 8192x8192 rendered lightmap for the whole object then resized down to 4096x4096.. BF42 does not seem to want to load up the huge 256MB 8192 lightmap but the 64MB 4096 works fine.
Bonaparte
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Re: Help.. Lighting my DC Level..

Post by Bonaparte »

When will this map be ready to download?
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Apache Thunder
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Re: Help.. Lighting my DC Level..

Post by Apache Thunder »

I recently discovered that lightmaps could be stored in DDS format. The benefit is you can have lightmaps in color. Thus you can have red light sourece, yellow light source etc without being limited to only one color scheme. (since normal lightmaps are in 8-bit grayscale TGAs). Compression artifacts make the small statics and ones without decent UV map optimization look a bit nasty but a single 2048x2048 DDS lightmap for you building might work out. Plus since it uses mipmaps it would lag less then if it was a TGA at the same size. DDS files take up justa bit more space then the traditional TGAs but account for the fact they are in color would offset the file space in terms of color options. :D

If you intend to convert lightmaps to DDS, you must first make them color lightmaps. DDS Converter 2/nvDXT will spit out an error if you try to convert them to DDS from 8-bit grayscale. Use something like Advanced Batch Converter which supports TGAs to do batch conversion and then convert those to DDS. Even if you don't modify any settings for the batch converter, the output files will still be in color. If you only have one TGA, then you can simply just use Photoshop or equilevent to save as color TGA prior to DDS format conversion. :D

(also note BF2 and newer BF games store lightmaps in several really large DDS files. ;))
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