Advanced Materials Explanation

#1 Light Map - contains baked shadows and lighting, greyscale, uses 2nd UV channel

Tone Map - coloured lightmap, uses 2nd UV channel

Detail Map - a simple greyscale overlay, areas >128 appears lighter, <128 is darker

Detail Normal Map - a normal map for the detail map, currently causing issues in Basic Lighting and so not being used in stock 1.1alpha

Overlay Map - uses 2nd UVchannel and alpha channel to determine which parts of this texture are visible over the top of the diffuse map

#2 Interesting, makes me wonder how all those can be implemented to a model. Wouldn't it be faster to just bake the light/shadow textures in the diffuse map rather than having to export them separately and add them separately? Wouldn't they both have the same effect?

#3 @ Ben: Yes and no. The light map uses the 2nd UV channel. If you had a box where all 4 sides had the same texture applied, then baking the lightmap into the diffuse wouldnt work. If you had a second uv map where each face has its own texture coordinates, the light map would be used on that UV channel. At least I think thats how it works.

#4 Yeah, I did not think about a model with the same texture on each side. If the box had the same texture on 4 sides for the diffuse then wouldn't that box need to be UV unwrapped a second time for the lightmap? By doing so, wouldn't that take more time to UVunwrap the diffuse, then make a separate UV for the lightmap(probably automated uv)?

Why not just UV it once with all four sides and prepare it for one baked use? The only downside from this is less quality in the diffuse map. Probably all depends on the model.

However, making multiple layers in torque3d makes it more easy to edit instead of having to go back into photoshop/gimp and reload another one... saving some time. I wish the glow effect feature had its own alpha layer that could be used in each channel.. haha.


Another question is why the first UV layer in torque3d (layer0) has a lightmap slot when it is to be used in the second uv layer(1), or am I mistaken and it can be used in layer0(uv channel 1)

Hmm... will have to look more into it.

#5 Or, if torque3d could set up point lights in the world editor, and would do a auto-bake of your level, and place those baked light textures in the Light map slot.

Now wouldn't that be dandy.

#6 That's what PureLight is for. And dang nice it is too.

#7 your lightmap ambient occlusion maps etc need far less resolution to achieve a good result so a second uv set is preferred. the lower res lighting simulations have an added bonus of being more diffused that way. things like ceiling rarely need much lighting effort to look nice but if the reesolution was lowered in the diffuse you'd notice it really fast.

so in summary, lighting resolution has no need to follow the diffuse resolution. you can also use the same assets more readily and swap your lightmap in the material for day/night.