How do you make Light Maps for the game environment?

# 1 09-03-2007 , 05:50 PM

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How do you make Light Maps for the game environment?

Hi,

I was trying to make a lightmap to have a shadow on the ground but it looked so blotchy.

The scene has a ground, houses, 3 walls. I used 4 directional lights, made a new uv set for the ground in a grid of 0 and 1 so that ground has at least 2 uvs.

1) What is the best way to make shadows on the ground for games using Maya?

I also vertex color the scene to replace the lightmap that I couldn't make properly, but it looked awful.

2) In a game, are all the objects supposed to have even lights?

Please let me know.

Thanks.

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# 2 10-03-2007 , 02:04 PM

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Are you baking the textures before you export? user added image

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# 3 10-03-2007 , 03:19 PM

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Baking Textures only bakes teture information, not lighting information. Most good game engines should supply lighting ingame. There really should be no need to export lighting. Its the game engine that matters. Research what technical specs the engine provides to know what you do and don't need.

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# 4 10-03-2007 , 06:29 PM

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I disagree. A light Map is a Gray scale from light Gray to dark, you have to bake it onto a plane to transfer the data to any game engine. To ad a shadow to the gray you would have to use any thing but Black gray or white and then bake it into the plane. it may not be the industry way but it works for me.

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# 5 12-03-2007 , 04:30 PM

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Lighting in Unreal Editor is much easier than Maya. I know making a light map is a long process without using Mental Ray.

If there are tutorials out there for game environments especially about lighting in a game, please let me know. I would be forever greatful. Thanks all.

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How do you make Light Maps for the game environment?

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