Lighting in Max (Static Mesh Creation)

[Ulukai]

I'm trying to create some modular static meshes in Max, and I'm going to bake the lighting onto the skins so I need to get my lighting sorted in Max before I export the maps and meshes.

I have these strip lights, thus:




I want the lighting to be as realistic as possible - I could place an omni light next to them to simulate the light coming from these strip lights, but is it possible to tell max that I want the white textured polygons to emit light? (Although this would mean non-point sourced lighting so...hrm. ) I've worked out how to set the white texture to self illuminate but I don't seem to be able to get any further that that. Any thoughts?

[Gingerbread Man]

You mean emit light IN Max, yeah?

You could try giving the light object an advanced lighting override material, then cranking the base material's self-illumination right up. Play with the override material's luminance scale until it looks good, and enable radiosity for the scene.

I don't know for sure if this will translate properly to the Render To Texture on the rest of the wall, but it's worth a go. Alternatively, you can always bit the bullet and go for the multiple omni approach (get a much subtler / realistic effect than a single omni) and then beef it up in UEd with a light...


(note: may contain ass-talking / inaccuracies... my copy of Max has been b0rked for a couple of months. But radiosity is certainly the way to do this, even if I've got all the steps sideways.)


(edit: rereading your post, I think you've already done all that except you didn't say if you'd enabled radiosity...)

[Ulukai]

Hmm, radiosity. I haven't played with it because I'd forgotten Max 5 could even do it. Ho hum, me bad. It's worth a shot, I'll have a dive into the (very comprehensive and surprisingly helpful) help files.

Edit:

Hmm, this is awesome. You can paint light onto textures directly via the viewport:



Then when I render it normally, it adds that light to the lighting calcs. How cool is that?

[Ulukai]

We have winnar



It's not radiosity, but it seems to do the job. But if I hadn't tried to enable radiosity, I wouldn't have found the feature in the first place

[Gingerbread Man]

\o/

$10 says all this kind of thing is a one-click operation in Max7... Bastard Discreet. LET US CATCH UP WON'T YOU

[scumble]

Baking light onto the skins? Are you talking about lightmaps or a permanent change to the material?
Max must be able to generate lightmaps, I just never got that far with it.

[Ulukai]

Baking light onto the skins? Are you talking about lightmaps or a permanent change to the material?

Yep, lightmaps. I then choose Render to Texture and thus I have skinned models with baked lighting (yum).

[scumble]

Have you got an ingame shot yet, or was that it?

[Ulukai]

Patience

[Ulukai]

For anyone who is interested, I've found out how to do what I originally wanted to do (without cheating using light painting):

"Self-illumination makes an object appear to glow in ordinary renderings, but does not contribute energy to the radiosity solution. To have radiosity processing take a self-illuminating material into account, make this material the base material of Advanced Lighting Override, then increase the value of Luminance Scale."

(From the help, under Advanced Lighting Override Material)

[Gingerbread Man]

O.o

That is what I said at the START

[Ulukai]

eek, So you did.

But for some reason the first time I looked at what you said I went looking for advanced lighting override, found light painting instead, got all excited and as is so often the way with Max, I went off at a tangent...

Still, know I knows both ways, which is good