bake better lightmaps in blender?

[unbirthday]

What I am looking for, is a method to bake high resolution lightmaps in blender using its fantastic radiosity renderer. The idea is to have lightmaps for the sun, and realtime lights for artificial lights. Seen this method done before, and it always looks superb.

qfusion and FTEQW support FBSP afaik, which seems to give much better results (Judging from what I've seen) than using q3bsp in Darkplaces. There is the idea of using a shader to load the external lightmaps, but I'm not sure how to do this. And also, with this method I think it would be quite inefficient if I have only a small outside area with lightmaps, and the rest was underground with realtime lights (Would be just black lightmap textures?)

If this can't easily be done with DP, then what sort of settings with q3map2 will give decent, realistic radiosity without jaggies or other ugly artifacts? Don't care about compiling time (Unless it's over 1 week on an core i7 ).

Thank you very much for the responses.

[golden_boy]

I basically use more samples, yeah, and throw more compile time at it, and the filesize grows pretty big. I've had 70 MB bsp files. The jaggies do go away, especially if you also use radiosity. I don't think you'll ever get "perfect" lightmaps from q3map2 though. It is an old tool after all.

Darkplaces is good, but if you really want the highest quality lightmaps, q3map2 might not be enough and you might have to use UDK and an external renderer for lightmaps (what was that program DICE used for Mirror's edge? Something like that). However, if everything else about darkplaces is working well for you, you might just want to make that tradeoff.

Lord Havoc told me that most DP/q3bsp based games use external lightmaps at some larger size (some q3map2 option). I believe these can then be compressed, too.

Ydnar doesn't work on q3map2 anymore. I've heard Lord Havoc knows his way around it. You might want to talk to LH directly (try #darkplaces at irc.anynet.org), he can probably help you better than I can.

/ I would still be interested if Blender lightmaps can be used for q3 maps somehow, so if you ever find out, do post here plz.

PS: Sock has done great looking scenes in Quake 3. He might have some advice as well.

[unbirthday]

@golden_boy, is it you that is the author of Scouts Journey? I've seen your blog several times in my frantic searching - I'm loving what you are doing! Yes your lighting with q3map2 is very good, I like what you did here:

O Lightmap, Why I Eyes You spawnhost

The final image looks very good, especially with the colour bleeding. However, did you manage to get reasonable settings that got rid of jaggies? (More samples I presume, and if so, did the filesize grow unreasonably?) I can see them straight away and it immediately tells me it's artificial light.

I think DP is perfect for my design, if I can get it to do this one thing, everything else is content. AAA games are mostly content anyway. DP is fast, its optimised so well, and I have access to the source to make whatever changes I like. Personally, I think it is a very competitive engine - the other option was UDK, which I was developing my prototype in, but DP supports everything I require except this one damn thing (Not sure if UDK supports it either, but it matters not, as lightmass is rather good).

@golden_boy, if you don't think DP is adequate, is there another free engine that you recommend?

I'm ready to reverse engineer q3map2 and make this happen if necessary, as long as it doesn't take me more than a couple of months. I just need direction from an experienced id tech coder (Or the author of q3map2?) I've hit the limit of my knowledge without further research, but I'm thinking the import/export switches in q3map2 could also be used to import/export the uv unwrap data? Does anyone know the active email address of someone that worked on q3map2? (ydnar?)

[golden_boy]

If anyone finds out how to import lightmaps from Blender into a q3bsp/fbsp, I'd be interested too.

@OP, I have found FBSP lightmaps with dirtmapping and bouncing enabled (and experimenting with samplesize) to be largely good enough for me; if you really want to compete with AAA games in the looks department, perhaps DP isn't the right engine and q3bsp isn't the right format. Quake 1 based stuff only goes so far.

Still interested in Blender lightmap import though.

[MadGypsy]

Good thing I can only count to 1 in Quake or that would matter to me.

sorry, not used to not having some kind of answer and certainly not used to not even understanding the question.

[Spike]

hmap2 despite all merits, is still limited to q1 bsps, and the lightmap/texture resolution ratio that goes with it.

[MadGypsy]

Doesn't DP want you to use hmap2? I barely even understand your question, so you may just want to ignore me. I can only count to 1 in Quake.

[unbirthday]

Thanks for the response.

This gentleman has the exact same problem as I, but I'm not sure if I like the solution:
TrueCombat :: View topic - D's screenshot dump

His solution is to duplicate the mesh and have it act as the lightmaps by using a q3bsp shader. Do you know if this method will work in DP? Or alternatively, does DP allow more than one material per mesh, unlike Q3? It seems like a clunky solution...

Using q3map2 for lightmaps is a last resort. No combination of settings seem to give me an adequate lighting solution.

[Spike]

I assume you're talking about q3map2 only..
In your worldspawn add this token to change per-surface details:
_lightmapscale 0.25
On your q3map2 commandline, add this argument to compensate for the increase in lightmap samples:
-lightmapsize 512

Note that the only difference between q3bsp and fbsp is that fbsp supports lightstyles (up to 4 per surface) and has a built in lightmap size of 512 instead of 128 (which can be duplicated by using external lightmaps in q3bsp, q3bsp should generate new shaders for you as needed to cope with this).

q3map2 will generally reuse parts of the lightmap for identical surfaces. This should mean that all your indoor surfaces all use the same tiny bit of lightmap so shouldn't be too big an issue.

Read the docs yourself.