Hi All. I am trying to render out lightmap data from mental ray into a game environment. Problem is, MR's lightmapping/bake set features dont appear to be very useful for game production.
Typically in games, When you generate lightmaps, you are able to specify a pixel resolution per square meter(or other unit) of area (such as 64 pixels or 128 pixels per meter). Mental ray doesnt seem to let you do this. It will bake the lightmap to a specified UV set that you need to create by hand(or use automatic mapping). Problem with this approach is that you can never get the pixel resolution consistant across complex surfaces when generating your own UV's. Also, automatic mapping generations is very innefficient, leaving lots of dead space in the map along with slivers or triangles too small to l lightmap effectively.
Does anyone know of a plugin or "hidden" feature within maya/mental ray to let you generate lightmaps with consistent user-specified pixel resolution like most in-house lightmapping tools use?
Seems odd that MR would't have this very basic feature available in their bake sets since it is needed for serious game production.
The inhouse lightmapping utilites usualy make the uvs for this to be possible.
THing is tahat theres no magical do things right tools around. Just better ways to lay out uvs thats all. For complex geometry that allways means either inacyuracy in the uvmapping or lots of innecicient pieces. THe fact that its atomaticlay handled does not mean its handled better than the way you do it, its allways a optimisation issue.
THis is one of those things where ist pretty easy to do for stuff like coridors and so on. Anyway there exsists no magic wand thats PERFERCT, just optimized for something else.
I've been using the MR bake for a while and I'm afraid I've found that the only way to get good results is to spend time laying out the UVs as carefully as possible. It's painstaking work, but it gets results in the end. The automatic mpping tends to make a mess of things, but I've heard there are automatic mapping scripts that do a better job than Maya's own, though I haven't found one to date.
Sorry this probably isn't the solution you were after, but a better automatic mapping script will probably help.