First off, I’m new to the forum, so hello everyone.
I would like to be able to use a global illumination renderer like lux to bake the lighting of a scene to a texture for use in the game engine. Ideally, I’d like something that could be integrated into blender so I could just use the “bake” button simply because then I won’t have to worry about exporting/importing things with multiple sets of texture coordinates and such, which is usually a pain.
I notice that at one point in Blender’s history, it had radiosity that actually worked, but it looks like that is no longer the case (the “indirect lighting” in 2.53 does not really serve this purpose as light doesn’t seem to bounce off of objects correctly if at all).
Basically, I’m hoping that someone who has done this sort of thing before could provide some general tips on how to achieve it as painlessly as possible.
This nifty LuxBlend thing seems like it might do what I’m looking for; does anyone happen to know if it supports baking integrated with Blender? That would be quite nice.
I’d like to know that, too. Apart from that, you might take a look at Gile[s] if you haven’t yet. It’s an external lightmapping program that has some GI features. http://www.frecle.net/index.php?show=giles.about
Theoretically, that is, as, unfortunately, I wasn’t able to use it. It can read a lot of files Blender can export to, but I never got it to work properly. Maybe it’s not that hard, there just doesn’t seem to much documentation about that out there.
Anyone around here ever used it and can teach me a thing or two about it?
I’ve used Gile[s], but not with blender. I know that the last time I used it for something I had to use the .b3d format, and even then I still lost some things. Since the scene I’m working with has multiple UV layers and materials meant for the game engine I don’t have much hope that I’d be able to get it into Gile[s] and back out very successfully. In the past I’ve basically been limited to exporting in a bunch of formats until I get one that Gile[s] can sort of read, re-making materials sort of like the original, generating the lightmap, then exporting into a format that whatever program I used to make the scene can read, and then re-applying the original materials again. It’s a shame, because Gile[s] works very well for its intended purpose.
That’s precisely why Lux seems so appealing to me: it actually has an aim of integrating with Blender. I’m kind of discouraged, though, because whenever I look online stuff about making lightmaps with Lux, I just find old forum threads in which someone says “No, you can’t do that, because then the specular lights wouldn’t work,” as if that somehow renders lightmapping completely useless in general.