Howto talk:Multi-channel lightmap
Blender simplifications
Hello Wayne!
Nice, but much too complicated, much too complicated! :-) You can have this all easier!
You don't need to combine all objects into one mesh. Uncheck "Clear" in the Baking Menu, bake the selected object, then selct the next one, bake it, and so on.... You can have 4 lightchannels per object: Red, Green, Blue and Alpha. So actually you can simultan bake three of those lights in one run by applying one of those colors to each light. For the Cessna 182 S I used: glareshield light in Blue, one of the dome lights in red and the one in green, all together in one run per object (Panel, controls, seats, cabin wall, ....) You only have to apply the alpha channel for the fourth light later in Gimp. Much, much faster! Use Blender Cycles if possible and use the GPU for it - this gives more realistic and fast results, with the number of samples you can control the render qualitity and render time. The light will bounce realistic and give later a realistic look. And if you have a powerfull GPU - create realistic physically based render material settings for the different objects and use them.... Create realistic light settings - use spotlights with correct angles and decide if soft or hard edges; or plane lights or mesh lights. For the glareshieldlight of the Cessna 182 S I used a meshlight, all others are spotlights.
If you need some help - just ask! I have a lot of experience with lightmaps and Blender (Cessna 182 S, Dornier 328)
Cheers
HHS --HHS (talk) 16:36, 19 August 2016 (EDT)
- Thanks HHS, I can see the usefulness of some of these tricks. I tried the different colored lights and it worked as you said. It would have saved a step or two in Gimp. It's nice to know about. As far as not joining everything, in the case of the Shuttle it was far easier to join it all than to try to keep track of what I did and didn't do. All the lights were to influence every part of the cabin so it worked to have one object. Also I baked 8 total lights. Yes it took awhile.
- One thing I am still unclear about is using multiple textures, am I right that you can only have objects mapped to one texture sheet per lightmap?
Links to effects
Is it particularly useful to link the files of the effects on the repository? They're actually only useful if you want to develop global FG shader code - aircraft maintainers aren't supposed to edit them, they're supposed to use inheritance to configure them - so perhaps a link to the documentation of the effects is more to the point?
Thorsten (talk) 08:48, 21 August 2016 (EDT)
- I guess, ultimately, it's probably your call - but given the state of our docs, I thought it may actually be helpful to not only mention the paths to the corresponding files, but also turn those into links, the barrier to entry is certainly lowered for people just skimming through such docs. Anyway, you are certainly right that most end-users will not even want to look at such implementation details, but they're also unlikely to even be bothered by irrelevant information to be provided in the form of a link that /can/ be clicked.--Hooray (talk) 10:29, 21 August 2016 (EDT)