Prelit Model Textures?

[DeathByNukes]

Is there any easy way to apply lighting to a model texture besides trying to paint it in Photoshop?

Example:

The orange light is textured on.

[Hourences]

lightmapping

Vertex colouring

etc

It depends on the engine youre working with, what it supports and what not

[DeathByNukes]

I'm making it in the XSI Mod Tool and exporting it to Half-Life 2

That example model is from HL2.

What im asking is if i can save the lighting into the texture so the model appears to light itself in game.

Models in Half-Life 2 are vertex lit so it would look and work a lot better to have the lighting in the texture.

[Pericolos0]

you can render lighting on the texture, i do it almost always with soft shadows in 3dsmax.

you can also do more correct lighting and put the model ingame as fullbright. Don't know what you have to put in the vmt file for that though

[DeathByNukes]

What's the name of the function that you use to do that?

[Pericolos0]

i made a little tutorial for this a while ago but never shared it with anyone , i hope it helps

for what to put in the vmt files, i really dont know but i'm sure you can find it on the valve developer wiki

Okay this is really easy, and can give kickass results. What we are gonna learn today, is rendering some nice lighting on you skin. hl2 models are vertexlit, but some soft shading doesnt do harm .

So you made a nice model, and want to prepare it for some hawt skinning. In this case, i made a door prop thing!!!!

Thats nice!

Now add a skylight and position it like i did on them pics. Dont forget to tick off the cast shadows button!

alright nice work!!

Now we have set up our scene for the lighting. You can create more complicated lighting stuff, but i'm just using a simple skylight for this as it creates some nice soft shadows at exactly the spots where nice soft shadows are expected to be

k now select you model and go to rendering -> render to texture

the following window should pop up:

add a lightingmap and set the size to something big like 1024 (you can rescale afterwards in photoshop)

click "unwrap only" first. It adds an unwrap modifier where can can first properly unwrap you model, or load a previous uvmap you made. Make sure there are no overlapping parts on your mesh.

Click render! This will take forever so now its time to get outside for a change. Enjoy life abit!

When the render is done it will look totally awesome and you will be very happy. save it and rescale in photoshop if necesary

you can already add it to your model now, looks a lot better already eh

now, make a little colored mesh with texporter if u wish, and start the skinning!!! Or give this + the colored mesh to you favorite texture artist and he will love you forever

you can also use this method to render stuff with some sharp shadows on you model. Watch out with that tho, make sure it would fit in the map

[ReNo]

Thats a sexy door arch, and a useful little tutorial For self illuminated textures you can just use the "unlitgeneric" shader, rather than "vertexlitgeneric". Works on world materials at any rate.

[Pericolos0]

another thing you can do, and this is especially useful if you have lights on the model that are litting up parts of the model, is use a lightingmap

i'm pretty sure that's whats been done in your example

[DeathByNukes]

Thanks for the help!

I dug around in XSI and found Property\Render Map

It looks like this is what I need.

[Fullauto]

<3 peri

Great tut.

[KoKo5oVaR]

Yes that looks cool, but you can only use the arch in one lightning situation

:/

[Pericolos0]

do you even read it?

Theyre just soft shadows coming from a diffuse skylight. That works in pretty much any situation

[KoKo5oVaR]

allright, i ve read it more conscientiously this time ( i do not have the best english ) so nevermind what i ve said, i was fool by deathbynukes's screenshot.

[KoKo5oVaR]

Well i ve try it, and that will be very usefull to an incrustation layer in photoshop, thanks peri

but still, i have a little problem

I don t know if it comes from my uvmaps or else, but that s a bit annoying

[Pericolos0]

just fix that in photoshop, or set the background color in 3dsmax to something brighter