POV-Ray : Newsgroups : povray.newusers : precompute light for game engine - possible? Server Time
29 Jul 2024 04:23:01 EDT (-0400)
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From: JoeJ
Subject: precompute light for game engine - possible?
Date: 14 Feb 2007 10:30:01
Message: <web.45d32a896d5322538885dc340@news.povray.org>
Hi, i'm totaly new to povray.
I plan to use it to precompute light for static BSP game level geometry.
Geometry is currently in a single lightwave obj file,
all polys have nonoverlaping UV coords in a single big texturemap.
After adding some light sources, is it possible to render this texturemap
(should then contain the lighting information only) instead of rendering an
usual image from the geometry by camera?
The same process is also called "Render to Texture" or "Texture Baking" in
other apps.

Please let me know if this is possible before i start digging too deep in
this cool piece of software.
Thanks in advance!


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From: Thorsten Froehlich
Subject: Re: precompute light for game engine - possible?
Date: 14 Feb 2007 12:24:26
Message: <45d345ca@news.povray.org>
JoeJ wrote:
> Hi, i'm totaly new to povray.
> I plan to use it to precompute light for static BSP game level geometry.
> Geometry is currently in a single lightwave obj file,
> all polys have nonoverlaping UV coords in a single big texturemap.
> After adding some light sources, is it possible to render this texturemap
> (should then contain the lighting information only) instead of rendering an
> usual image from the geometry by camera?
> The same process is also called "Render to Texture" or "Texture Baking" in
> other apps.

POV-Ray is a ray-tracer. There are no shadow maps or anything like that to
be exported in a ray-tracer. My guess is that there are special tools for
rendering shadow maps out there.

	Thorsten


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From: JoeJ
Subject: Re: precompute light for game engine - possible?
Date: 15 Feb 2007 10:10:00
Message: <web.45d476d51be07d1a8885dc340@news.povray.org>
Thanks. I think it would work if i would create a facing orthogonal camera
for each polygon and using only materials with eye position independent
lighting (no speccular).
A problem would happen if the camera falls in solid space (2 close walls).
Maybe i'll try, more probably i'll implement lighting by myself...

However, precalculating complex lighting, which later can be mapped to a 3D
object in real time is a good thing. I put this on my wishlist for a future
release.


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