WIP Ray Traced Baked Lighting CS:GO Map

Had the weird idea of baking out a façade of a level in Blender Cycles and importing into CS:GO as emission props. I have working prototypes of small levels that ended up looking hella good, usually made of one giant model with a 4k texture and color data is nicely preserved for HDR use. I want to move on to make an entire level but didnt know how multiple 4k textures everywhere (i'm talking having at most 20 on screen at a time) would impact players PCs so I decided to make a small wingman map to test out this new method. I just need to know if my maps gameplay is at least ''alright'' so that I can begin the detail process. I have some sceenshots as proof of concept and my workshop wingman map https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/fi…/?id=2281876856

There are some drawbacks however like no dynamic lighting, very long render times, making changes means carefully deciding what to re-render, deciding how to chop up a level into small props, consistent texture scaling between models, collision meshes being too simple, decals not showing up on some models, and no phong shading.

However i believe this method could bring archviz level of detail or at least make the game look like one of those cool frag movie videos where everything is rendered out photorealistic. The screenshots were just to demonstrate the soft diffuse lighting and brightness range but the actual level will have proper textures and high poly meshes.

Quote from 0kelvin

On 1/12/2021 at 2:08 PM, 0kelvin said: Years ago I tried this same concept in quake 3. There was an open source render that could comput raytracing and export the lightmaps. But the steps were overly complicated and with issues with lightmap's edges bleeding.

Interesting. This process does require multiple steps such as writing each texture to each model one by one and applying correct parameters, and i have to properly space out the UV islands. However, i have begun to use a new plugin to allow me to efficiently organize and space out UVs to prevent any texture bleed and the most usage of pixel space.

Quote from blackdog

On 1/13/2021 at 4:33 PM, blackdog said: Oh seen this before but I never commented. It looks great, it’s very interesting…

what I’m wondering now is: aren’t you gonna hit some engine limitation that makes this not as viable?

ive tried finding any limitations online and the only problem that may come up is when packing everything and uploading to the workshop.

Here is another test i conducted about a year ago. I forgot where i had placed it this whole time. If i remember correctly, each wall is its own model, the ceiling and floor are 4 models, the debris on the floor is 1 model, and the green beams are one model. Each of those had a 4k texture applied to them and loading in the level was no problem