Lightmaps

For the zombie shooter we're currently working on we want to have an atmospheric environment with light and dark areas. This is hard to achieve with directors/shockwaves default lighting system. It's possible to place some realtime Omi lights but only a few can be used and they won't give the result we're looking for. 

Instead of realtime lights we've decided to use lightmaps to tint the environment. A lightmap is simply put an extra texture image which contains the "baked" light information of a 3D scene.

Once the lightmap image has been made it can be superimposed on top of the 3D models original Diffuse texture giving the result as seen below. As you can see the color nuances of the lightmap image are transferred to the environment mesh. 

That's it for this post.

Cheers,

Matt