On to the lightmapper

A slightly early start, which I think will be needed for this stage. My main concerns with the lightmapping process is that I won’t have the time to bake shadows. I don’t know why this bothers me or why I think it won’t be feasible in a two-week period, but it’s something that I keep thinking about.

I don’t have a way to immediately export the CSG from the scene, either. The option is there, but I need to expose it and it, like the rest of the editor, won’t be pretty. The plan is to export the CSG, save it as a Maya scene with some way of indicating that the geometry is to be considered for lightmapping (with the final editor, this will be something on a per-model basis) and import it into the editor then bake the lighting information.

Initially, I want to have eight lumels per unit. This may be too much but we’ll just have to see. Objects in the scene marked as models won’t be getting lighting information until I’m happy with the stage geometry’s look. A basic cuboid is fine for testing, but I’ll make something more interesting to exercise the process. Stitching all the lumels together is another task that I’m unsure if I’ll be able to get into this demo, too. It may be that I’ll end up with a map per polygon, as much as that alarms me it should be okay for this small scene.

Hopefully, there will be screenshots of the progress in the next entry.