Beast / Lightmass style lightmapping in levels.

#1 I agree, there really should be a decent lightmapping solution integrated directly into T3D. Purelight seems like a good solution, but it really needs to be integrated, like Unity Pro + Beast. (And personally, I'd like to see a solution costing much less than PureLight's $500, even if the lightmap size/quality were reduced.)

#2 Ditto on the price point. PureLight is far too expensive for adding just a single feature to the engine. Other resources, such as AFX, add much more at a fraction of the cost. I'd like to see a solution costing much less than PureLight's $500, without any size/quality reduction.

#3 I would love to see it too, but I wouldn't count on it.

Beast is a MUCH more expensive tool than Purelight as a standalone product. If you consider it a "single feature" then a Beast license with API is a single feature that is more expensive than just about all but the highest end game engines on the market.

You may think that resources like AFX "add more for a fraction of the cost", but in fact a much smaller fraction of work goes into something like AFX than into a usable high-quality lightmap unwrapping/rendering tool. It's a very complex product.


Unfortunately this is one of the rare benefits of a non-source engine.

Unity is able to include Beast in their toolsets for an affordable price because they don't provide the source code to the editor, and thus they don't have to provide direct access to the Beast API, so they can negotiate a reasonable bulk price with Autodesk for inclusion in their editor. And still the Global Illumination features, which are what make Beast shine, are only available in Unity Pro, which is more than twice as expensive as T3D and Purelight combined.


If the guys who make Purelight can come up with an API for their product then it might be possible (though still probably not less than $500), but I think I seem to recall broaching that subject with them a while back and they said they had no plans to do so.

#4 Just to point out, you can actually create lightmaps in most 3D modeling apps. You certainly can in Blender and that's free.

Personally, I have had more than $500 of entertainment just watching pureLight bake.

#5 That's true. I've never really used blender, but in 3DS Max you're typically responsible for doing your own breaking up of geometry and unwrapping in a separate UV set to do any meaningful lightmap baking. It's something that I have used to good effect with Max and mental ray, but it's definitely a far cry from being able to click a button in the mission editor... or even load a Collada file in Purelight ;)

#6 I fully agree guys. I used the trial of Purelight, and it was just fantastic, really awesome product and the time it saves not having to organise your UV2's etc. is worth the purchase price alone IMO...

The reason I'm asking though , and the reason I've not purchased the full version of Purelight yet is that I've designed my game to use instanced geometry, so loads of crates, wall pieces, dozens of kitparts, then these are instanced in the engine loads of times in different orientations to create new objects from the same set of blocks. By creating these blocks in purelight and exporting them with nice lighting I'd lose the massive gain I have from having instanced geometry but have great lighting. Or for instance instead of having 100 barrels exported as a lump with incredible Purelight lighting , I've got one barrel instanced 100 times in the mission editor with a generic AO bake that's the same on each barrel... It would be amazing if Purelight worked in your .mis scene, using your game lights and created a bake with all of the cool features and beauty of Purelight in your scene, AKA Beast/Unity but with all the gains of geometry instancing etc...

THEN you'd see some amazing results...I'm only saying, I'm still a huge T3D/Purelight fan, I'd still pay the $500 fee or whatever it is too, it would be cool to see the two products marry and have a big 'Map UV2' button, and then 'Purelight scene' button directly in your mission.

#7 You'd probably have a better chance of coming up with a way to automate the process of exporting the entire scene as Collada, running it through Purelight, and breaking it back up into a scene for rendering. Considering how long a good GI bake takes, you wouldn't be losing all that much from doing the bakes directly in the editor.

If you're thinking about performance in regards to your instanced geometry, once you apply baked lighting to all of your objects you aren't going to get much in the way of gains since each instance will need to use different textures. Some memory savings for your vertex arrays is about all.

#8

Quote:If you're thinking about performance in regards to your instanced geometry, once you apply baked lighting to all of your objects you aren't going to get much in the way of gains since each instance will need to use different textures....

Aaaah, very interesting Gerald.....Now that makes me think I should stick to an SSAO solution to everything insted then, and leave the nice lighting to specific bespoke areas....Thanks for the explanation...Really interesting stuff....

#9 If you have the time to play with you may want to try it both ways to see just how much of a performance difference there is. In most games on modern hardware your bottleneck is going to be fill rate, so unless you're pushing a real crap load of triangles and large numbers of your instanced objects are visible at any given time, you're not going to get much benefit from instanced geometry anyway.

And if that is the case, you could also consider making it a quality delta, so users with higher-end systems can have a better experience.