shadow maps vs lightmaps.

#1

I have the inside of a building prepared. But it does not look realistic, (needs shadow work). I was thinking of buring my shadows into the textures somehow. I did read up on lightmaps but I am not sure if this is the same thing as a shadow map? I do not want my walls to glow, just to show proper shadows in the corners and stuff.

#2

your walls wont “gLow” at all… a lightmap simply tells the game engine what to color your walls based on the lights color and intensity…in most cases the shadow map is mixed with the light map and overlayed in a different map channel on top of your mesh…check out this link…
http://www.unwrap3d.com/tutorial_lightmap.html

#3

This seems to make your special made tiles almost useless :frowning:

#4

wrong…if you texture a wall with a tiled brick pattern in channel 1…say 25x so the pattern fills the wall coreectly then you bake your lightmap and then use channel 2 to put in the lightmap (which is not tiled)…over your 25x tiled brick pattern they will mix to make a tiled/lighted wall…simply put, the texure is tiled but the lightmap is not…but they blend together…you seee it done in every game …its a common practice used by every game out there that uses light maps.
:beer:

#5

I think Mankor explained it well. Though I wouldn’t go so far as to say all game engines use em :stuck_out_tongue: Though most do. Just keep in mind that a lot of games try to prevent lightmaps if they can use pre-lit tiles in places. Lightmaps tend to add extra computations.

#6

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