Vassago
05-30-2003, 04:50 AM
Our company is currently working on Daredevil, for Xbox and PS2, using Renderware. In the past, using 3dsmaxR4 we hand painted our scenes using the vertex paint modifier. This was not only extremely time consuming, but in the end would produce results that were not optimal to our art standards. I recently picked up Max5 at home, and began doing tests using it's radiosity lighting.
While the results within Max were the same as any other GI app
(Arnold, Lightscape, etc), I was unsure if they would properly export to Renderware.
I talked our staff into picking up a copy for the office to test it out with RW. To my extreme satisfaction, the vertex baking ported the radiosity info flawlessly. For those of you using Renderware and Max5, and considering using Radiosity, there was only one thing I found as a downside. You need to bake the vert colors with the radiosity box checked, as well as "mix vertex colors". If you do not check that mix box, the vertex bake will completely obliterate your tri-stripping. I tested meshes that stripped with a 85% quality ratio. When the "mix colors" box was checked, it retained that quality. When it was unchecked, it was visually better looking, but it ripped my quality down to 17%. It's basically seperating every triangle in the scene with seperate color info.
When the colors are mixed though, visual quality of the lighting dropped a smidge. I'd say that on average it dropped to around 85% of the quality I got otherwise. So in retaining the stripping I lost about 15% of the overall lighting quality. So the scene still looked incredibly realistic, and I retained the high performence tristripping I needed. I hope this info helps at least one person out there ;)
While the results within Max were the same as any other GI app
(Arnold, Lightscape, etc), I was unsure if they would properly export to Renderware.
I talked our staff into picking up a copy for the office to test it out with RW. To my extreme satisfaction, the vertex baking ported the radiosity info flawlessly. For those of you using Renderware and Max5, and considering using Radiosity, there was only one thing I found as a downside. You need to bake the vert colors with the radiosity box checked, as well as "mix vertex colors". If you do not check that mix box, the vertex bake will completely obliterate your tri-stripping. I tested meshes that stripped with a 85% quality ratio. When the "mix colors" box was checked, it retained that quality. When it was unchecked, it was visually better looking, but it ripped my quality down to 17%. It's basically seperating every triangle in the scene with seperate color info.
When the colors are mixed though, visual quality of the lighting dropped a smidge. I'd say that on average it dropped to around 85% of the quality I got otherwise. So in retaining the stripping I lost about 15% of the overall lighting quality. So the scene still looked incredibly realistic, and I retained the high performence tristripping I needed. I hope this info helps at least one person out there ;)