3Ds Max - Global Illumination

[Rhino]

Hey guys I need a little bit of help with setting up a good GI light system in max to render lightmaps on my map

I'm looking at doing something along these lines:


So that with my sky light outside walls of buildings etc will be a little bit illuminated by the GIs but the inside wall of a building will not.

I have tried many different things, setting up 6 lights in a circle like that pic but the shadows generated by them where far too hard which might have just been a settings prob thou dont think it was.

So dose any one have some good suggestions on how I can get this result? I'm not looking for a "fill light" which will evenly light everything including inside walls, such as a sky light with default settings would do.

Hope this makes seance, cheers for any help

[harefort]

1. Use a directional light for the sun, so that the 'sunrays' will be parallel.
2. Use a Skylight for the fill, but enable the 'Cast Shadows' flag.

This will give you soft ambient occlusion (= inside of buildings are dark) and a hard sun-shadow.
Alternatively you can use mentalray to render the ambient occlusion with more control than the default skylight.

[Rhino]

1, sun is not my prob, already have that setup.

2. Ye what I'm trying at the moment, it gives just the effect I want, the problem is its taking like 20, 30mins per lightmap to do, where I have 4,000 objects, each with a average of 3 LODs so thats around 1200 renders to do, x 30mins = 25 days, I dont have that kind of time just to do my sky light... Trying to optimize it at the moment but ehhh, if any one has any idea of how to get around the same effect as a sky light with shadows, but being able to render it much, much faster I would really like to hear it

[showNOmercy]

As far as I know you shouldn't have a skylight in your scene if your lightmapping in 3ds max for BF2. What shadow type do you have selected for your lights, especially omni lights? I believe it should be 'Ray Traced Shadows'.

[Rhino]

Originally Posted by showNOmercy

As far as I know you shouldn't have a skylight in your scene if your lightmapping in 3ds max for BF2. What shadow type do you have selected for your lights, especially omni lights? I believe it should be 'Ray Traced Shadows'.

ye look at post 4

The problem with that tut is that it dose not have a proper "GI" light setup, it only has the "fill light", then the sun and point lights and that's it, hardly worth having a sky light like that tbh. What I'm trying to get is a good GI lights system in, which the sky light dose really well, problem is the time it takes to do it..... If I try turning down its rays or w/e it looks like crap

[showNOmercy]

Ha... I was to slow in editing my post, I saw you were the first to reply to 1/2hawk's thread so I removed that bit.

[harefort]

If your maps look like in the image above, you can optimize by baking with different resolutions.
Bake areas with small details with a high amount of samples.
Bake the rest with a lower amount of samples.
Combine in photoshop.

Could you post some more numbers (lightmap size, bake-settings) so we can better understand why it takes 25 minutes to bake?
Maybe there's more room for optimization without loss of visual quality.

[Rhino]

I'm referring to staticobject's, not terrain. Terrain is already done like that in the BF2 editor which is the best place to LM terrain, but objects its best to do in max.

Really I'm looking for a light system that dose the same as a sky light with shadows enabled but with a different system that's faster, if possible

[harefort]

Hmm.

If you want to the skylight-effect, there's no way around using lots of rays.
Blender supports another method that is fast and noise-free but I reckon it doesn't work well with low vertex-density.

Try Mentalray with fewer samples or lower lightmap resolution.
Skylight/Ambient Occlusion in general does not need a high resolution, unless you have loads of tiny details.

I really would like to see a sample of your baked objects, because I do not believe you that there's no more room for optimization.

[Rhino]

ye I really need to use 3DsMax since it has the correct BF2 tools I need, and I dont think I can learn and use anouther program in under 2 weeks to do the same job

Here is a sample of part 1 of my mosque static I've been testing it out my sky light on, using the skylight with shadows I get this, which is basically what I want apart from I also need the fill light so the inside rooms are not pitch black, hence the black areas but I had that turned off so I could see what this light was doing.



As you can see, the roof to the left, 1 down from the top is nicly lit, has some faint shadows from the dome etc, perfect. The walls also have some light being casted on them with also shadows from surrounding buildings. There is also light peeking though the door at the very centre top etc.

This is just what I need, but a 20min render time is not a option...