Project Reality Forums

Hey all.

I claimed ages ago that I had managed to sort out the age of problem for us mappers of getting trees to cast decent shadows on objects in my first blog here: Advances in 3DsMax LMing with Overgrowth - Project Reality Forums

Then I realized shortly after posting that blog that there was a small problem which I posted in the comments that basically these lightmaps didn't turn out quite right ingame.

Well now with my second attempt at doing this with my first initial test this seems to now be working

Not 100% sure what I did differently from last time but ye, it looks to be working now

Anyways less talk, more screens


Normal Lightmapping:



New Lightmapping method with transparent leaves:



It might look in the second screenshot that the leaves are hardly casting any shadows but there are a few small blobs of shadow here and there and if the temple had a higher rez lightmap you would see much more detail with the leave shadows

Hopefully I have not jumped the gun on this again but so far looks to be working well and hopefully this method should be applied to all new maps that will be lightmapped in 3DsMax

Looks good Rhino, nice work.

So basically trees will now cast accurate shadows instead of completely dark shadows?

nice one

that is pretty sweet

very good

Master level work!

this on fools/mestia/kozelsk will look awesome.


good work

sounds cool

lookin' good

This looks great Rhino nice work mate

If only we had some volume light to shine through the leaves now

Very good

Awesome!

Thank you for your hard work in making our experience in PR more realistic. Keep up the good work!

Does this impact performance in any way?

Dr2B Rudd;bt1706 wrote:Does this impact performance in any way?

no since all lightmaps are is pre-defined light so the client, aka player dose not need to generate the lightmaps when he is playing. As such what is on the lightmap itself dose not effect performance, only the lightmap size will effect the performance which I'm keeping that size around the same as what it would be normally. So thous 2 examples above for the client/player would have no difference in performance between the 2, which ever you used.

How ever it dose take slightly longer for me to generate these lightmaps with these transparent leaves but I managed to do the Sun light in 35hrs on my PC which isn't too bad

lol PR lightmaps folding @ home anybody?