Why I love Ventilator's lightmapping plugin

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impressive. still, it's static lighting and static shadows only which is quite limiting. imagine the trees waving in the air, throwing dynamic shadows on the houses, day/night cycles with changing atmosphere...

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I still don't quite get what you want to say with this. It is not Far Cry, we all know that, and A7 is not the Cry Engine. So what? We are not Bluebyte, we are not Crytec, we are not Dave Perry. Astonished?

To me, there is nothing more convincing than this plugin, because all the other shader based tools like Sphere or IceX killed the frame rate and caused issues where I would have needed an additional coder who only had to take care of compatibiliy of the shaders and keeping everything visible as it should be. (And, be sure, I wasted a lot of time with this experiments! )

Maybe, Zapan's plugin does the job within reasonable frame rates and efforts, but, ventilator's plugin already showed what it does.

This is my rant for the 'bird in the hand' which 'is worth two in the bush'.

And, take another look, look at the market, and where people like us with the engine we've got could have a chance to compete:
http://www.bigfishgames.com/download-games/1059/virtualvillagers/index.html
Look at this this way: the CryEngine has no chance to compete on this market!

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imagine the trees waving in the air, throwing dynamic shadows on the houses, day/night cycles with changing atmosphere...

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one could cycle through shadowmaps of the house roof

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have fun

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What I am wondering is: performance of scene-management (indoor and outdoor) and the possibility to combine normalmapping with this plugin.

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Lightmapping basically just is multitexturing so it should not affect scene management too much if at all (the way I see it). And because of multitexturing, it should be possible to code a shader which takes the color map (texture), lightmap and the normal map and does all of the necessary calculations. If this is not yet possible, it shouldn't be too much of a pain to implement.

Though this is just my view of the issue. I am not familiar with the structure of the plugin so I might be talking rubbish here...

EDIT: humm we are talking about baking here... well then you don't really have to pass both the texture and the lightmap to the shader, the models should be ready to go for normal mapping.

i like the screenshots a lot! thanks for posting them.

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I also think (maybe a bit naiv but I try at least ) that it should be a simple per-pixel multiplication with the shadowmap on top of the normal-/specular-shaded pixel.

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yes, it's that simple. i think the result won't be 100% realistic (but what is in games? ) since you would need to know which shadow belongs to which light to do correct specularity for example but this shouldn't be a big deal. you also have the same problem with dynamic shadows (like the current stencil shadows) if they just get overlaid after the whole scene got rendered already.

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... completely confused and should probably should drop out of the gaming industry.

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1. a standard acknex render looks like this: http://www.churness.com/axys/NoLightMap.jpg so this is "our 3dgs state of technology". wow.

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no it's not. it uses no shaders. 3DGS can use shaders without use of plugins, and so it's a lie to say that this is the state of 3DGS technology while withholding eye-candy.

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But we only need to attach a second UV-set in MED with texture.

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@lostclimate: hell, i do not condemn baking shadows. you didn't get my point. so again, in slowmo:
1. a standard acknex render looks like this: http://www.churness.com/axys/NoLightMap.jpg so this is "our 3dgs state of technology". wow.
2. vent created a plugin. it is a plugin like matt's sphere engine: it tries to add features to a6 (in other words, kill the inconveniences) by sacrificing ease of use (you need a bunch of additional programs and customise piles of code to work with it) and speed (>sphere).
3. everyone says "aaaah" when they see David's pictures. don't forget: standard acknex looks like the screen posted in 1.) what you like is a) the light and shadow rendering done in gile[s] (not 3dgs) and b) vent's plugin (not 3dgs). the scene wouldn't look close as good as it's now.
nevertheless, David has done a nice work in setting up the scene, choosing colors, textures, building the environment etc.
4. acknex is not even capable of using this 10 year old shadow baking technology at a decent level, or tell me why David couldn't light his scene with a6 onboard-tools. i do not want to talk about dynamic shadows.
5. why should shadowmapping be bad? even doom3 uses it http://seiryu.cside.to/3dfps/Doom3/doom3-shadow01.jpg
6. what makes me sad is that, even if you wanted to, you simply could let the tga-transparent textured tree throw a dynamic shadow on the ground. and, in fact, without the plugin, you couldn't even use a static one.

all in all: a work around, like vent's plugin, is barely an engine feature. i like vent's plugin as well. but it cannot console me that this should be a built-in easy to use standard engine feature. not the work of an external program and a hobby(? excuse me if it's wrong) programmer.

oh, and:

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... completely confused and should probably should drop out of the gaming industry.

you are part of the game industy? are you really? or are you only someone who wants to be? show us your products then...

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The screens look amazing. Great work!
For the discussion about the baked lights:

Interactive Architecture

There was also a big discussion about rendering lights and bake them on geometry.
This project was done in A6 and we just used some simple shaders/scripts to combine the lightmaps with the diffuse textures. There is no need for a plugin to realize such nice looking sceneries. All you need is a serious render-engine

Conitecs engine supports lightmaps, cool, use it.

cheers

zwecklos

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