QUOTE(Joojaa @ 01/11/07, 04:43 AM) [snapback]256899[/snapback]
how do you light them. Thing is most users light totaly bonkers, i ean even on maya 8 the default occlusion is worse quuality then fg occlusion at a 100x speed penalty.
Se the default settings arent much to cheer about but once you pull up the right settings and right shaders you get there in a jiffy.
Thanks for the response! Nobody seems to know anything about vertex lighting problems on any other message board I've tried.
I'm not sure I totally understand your response, but here's basically what I do:
I've got a scene of about 900,000 polygons (game level).
Every shader is a simple Lambert with a texture map.
I create a single point light and place it near some geometry.
In the mental ray render globals, I set the mode to Draft. (final gather, GI, and caustics are off).
I select one piece of geometry near the light.
I open the MR Prelight dialog box (polygons->colors->Prelight (MR).
My options here are "Object to bake: Selected", "Bake To: Verticies", "Color Mode: Incoming Illumination Only", "Bake Shadows", "Normal Direction: Surface Front", "Camera: Persp", "Keep Original Shading Network", "Use Bake Set Override" -> the bake set override is default except I select "Alpha Blending: Don't Overwrite"
Doing this on a single 32 poly object with a single light will take about 5 minutes to complete. Selecting multiple objects or adding multiple lights and I've waited up to 30 minutes before giving up and closing maya.
If I do the same thing above with Prelight (Maya Software) instead of mental ray, everything is very fast (almost instant). BUT, the second I put another light in the scene, the 1st light's output looks dimmer. Each light I add cuts the light output of every other light until it's impossible to get anything near a white vertex color. Maya SW is so fast I'd love to use it but I can't figure out how to make the lights stay bright. And I CAN'T BELIEVE nobody's ever seen this problem and it's not documented in Maya.
Augie