i’ve been trying out how to do some kind of light mapping, and I figured out how to bake renders, but does anybody know how to UV map say a wal texture, then bake the light into a different texture? and am I supposed to use a different blending modes for the light maps? anyways, i’m having some trouble figuring this out, has anyone else had any luck?
I am 50% done with a tutorial on this very subject 
the new baking features really are nice.
here is a release note on the subject until then.
http://www.blender.org/cms/Render_Baking.827.0.html
pay close attention to the multiple UV map features.
you can do all kinds of different baking
The tutorial should be done soon as I have a bit more time, tomorrow afternoon with any luck.
I have a vertex texture blending demo with a shading map
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=85614
p00f, hurry up with your tut please!
I really wanna know how to use this useful feature.
Oh yeah, it rocks the casbah!
The AO baking is great, makes a great base for painting textures, I got a few artifacts in this example but thats nothing that photoshop cant fix. Hopefully i’ll have time to make some weapons this weekend, maybe add try and them to the FPS template (don’t hold your breaths though :))
You don’t have to do much for just set your A.O settings, make sure your model is unwrapped then press ctrl+alt+b and select A.O to bake the texture.
Haven’t had much luck with the multiple UV maps though so i’m interested in reading your tutorial too p00f, get cracking :D.
yeah p00f that tutorial would help alot of us lol. Yeah i’m having trouble figuring out multiple UV coordinates, I can create and modify them, with seperate textures, but I’m stuck on generating light maps over the base textures 
I don’t even know what that is, could u tell me?
Lightmapping - the application of baking light sources and shadows into a texture to give the appearence of shading.
Multi UV channels - having two or more completely different UV maps for the same object
Ok…
here is an easy way in a nutshell…
Make a blender material with your original UVmapped texture…
Press f12 to make a render, and make sure everything is cool…
after than, select the model and press F, then select all faces .
in a UV editor make a new texture called Whatever you want…
Control alt-B and select the top one… enter render or whatever.
go make a sandwitch…
come back and enjoy…
This should bake the original texture, and the shadows to the new texture.
If you like it, be sure to save the new texture.
the multiple UV thingie is handy if you have overlapping UVs in your original UV map.
this way your second UV map can be for the final bakeing… DONT OVERLAP THE UVS on the second map.
EDIT:
It also dose not like verry small textures…
so unless you like “pixelated programmer art (ppa)” I suggest biger textures for best results.
I have found a minimum of 512x512 works,pretty good for most of my needs.
1024x1024 works even better… then reduce in gimp if needed. Complex UV maps you will probably want bigger…
watch the seams of your UVmap… if you see other parts of the texture on the edge, just try a bigger texture and re-bake it…
i also have no idea if the Multiple UV thing works in the game engine or not… I will try later when i get time…
If you bake both your shadows and texture to the same map, you wont need 2 textures… THis is much better then the way unreal and quake do it
Hope that helps…
I am delayed for a while on the tutorial… I am on a bug hunt
I can really tell that these features will REALLY improve the grfx in blender games.
How do you make multi-layered UV maps??
go to the mesh editing buttons, and click “new” next to the UVTexture button. to get different UV coordinates. i’m still figuring stuff out, maybe p00fs tutorial will help once he’s done
Multiple-texture support depends on your gfx card, though most support at least two textures per object. Some support three, don’t know about more. I would highly recommend putting your base texture (the one you want everyone to see) in the first layer, then adding your cool effects textures (reflection maps, normal maps, whatever) in the second/third layers. That way you can be sure everyone can see something when they play your game, no matter what their gfx card support level.
You can read about multi-texturing and more in the Blender GameEngine Material Docs (find them in the Game Engine section on this page: http://www.blender3d.org/cms/Documentation.628.0.html Download instead of viewing online, because some of the images are broken in the online version, particularly the multi-texturing image.)
BTW, thanks for the info on light-mapping, guys. I’m going to have to try it out now.
Edit: Oh, wait. I hadn’t looked at this yet. UV Layers is a whole new thing. Sorry. I was confused. I’ll leave the other stuff in my post in case someone didn’t know about those things yet.
I tried. It seems that well, how do i explain this…? Well if the “floor” is not a plane, you may encounter serious problems. Atleast that was my first experience with this. Since if its a cube it uses each face for baking and the dark faces on other side make the texture black.
And also, dont use mirrors unless you have one static camera cos then the reflection looks strange.
That was my experience on it. But now i can get shading for my adventure game.
Eugene from Blendernation has a great video tutorial on the new Multiple UV maps (demonstrated with a pre RC1 build) at geneome.org. Actually he has a lot of nice tutorials there. Make sure you Right-click and save as… or whatever magic your browser requires to download the links.
Oh yes, the limitation you may encounter with this, everything should probably have a thickness. This votes out my Maze game because all the walls don’t have thicknesses.