I need help to merge my lightings into the vertices

I want to do that so my meshs emit the same light effect without any lighting on the scene.

Basically I made slabs of road I’m planning to import into a PC game, and I applied lighting on them. But the lighting can’t be exported to my game editor. So I get textured slabs in my editor, but they no longer have the nice light effects.

This is how one of my slabs look like in Maya 2015 :

I used a dark blue ambient light, and area lights for the light supposed to come out of the lampposts and red arrows for example.

I’d like my slabs to look like this into my game editor (using something I think is called “vertex lighting” which apparently makes the mesh itself show different shadows/lights in itself)

I tried looking it up on google and youtube. But I couldn’t find a tutorial I could understand.

Also, I found something called “batch bake (mental ray)” on youtube. I tried it, but the effect is not at all what I want (I can’t manage to get what the guy gets in his video).

I’m french and pretty new to maya, and this is the very last thing I need to finally start building my stage I found out everything else myself, but this, I just can’t.

I hope someone help me.

Regards, .

Also, being new to maya, I think I won’t understand pointings. I mean, to be sure to get what I want (if someone can help me), I’d need a very precise direction of what to do, where to go, what to check etc. Thanks again to anyone who’ll help !

And when I use these settings here, I can’t get something good at all : http://imageshack.com/a/img633/1213/wt7Ovv.png

Thanks to anyone who solve my problem !

Vertex shadows are something like vertex painting, where the vertices have a color that can be displayed, the problem though is that it depends on how many vertices the mesh has, otherwise you don’t get enough detail. I don’t think UE4 supports that though, so that may not even be an option.
The other thing though, if you want to bake lighting with a different program than UE4 is that there’s no way to use that easily, since UE4 manages lightmaps internally. You can’t just make a texture and use it for like Emissive in your material or anything like that, since it has to know what is specifically part of the lighting. Potentially tools could be made to make that process easier, like a script for Maya and a tool in UE4 that can tell how to use the stuff generated in Maya, but someone would have to create that.

Anyways, my recommendation is to use the lighting system in UE4 rather than trying to use stuff generated from Maya.

Hi, thanks for answering !

So I have a few questions to clarify a bit what you said :

  • What is UE4 ?
  • My mesh is a mesh that is supposed to be used in a game that came out in 2003. So yeah, there’s not a lot of vertices. Does that mean it’s impossible to realize ?
  • If I were to bake to textures, would the textures emit light or something ? And most importantly, could I re-assign all the textures to where they belong instantly ? Since the biggest textures I can use are 1024x1024 in the game… Each face use a different texture. I can’t use a texture that represents the entirety of the mesh you see ? :confused:

Edit: I multiplied the number of vertices by 100 and I still get a weird thing, and when I delete the lights afterwards, my mesh is still not lighted when I render (if I don’t delete the lights, it looks exactly the same as before like I didn’t do anything)

I got that : http://imageshack.com/a/img661/7753/OXJhqv.png

Don’t bake to vertices is what I’m saying.

UE4=Unreal Engine 4, which is what this site is for.

Oh so this is a 3D software too then ? But I’m afraid, because I couldn’t import my meshs in 3DS MAX without loosing my texture assignment and my lightings, so are you sure I could import my mesh without loosing this ? It took me like 250 hours to assign all the textures… And about 100 hours to place the lights :s

Are you sure why you’re posting here? Are you trying to make games using Unreal Engine 4?

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I’m not making a game, I’m creating a stage. I use Maya to design the level geometry. Everything works fine, I already managed to import my meshs into my game, but the only things I can’t import are the lightings.

Which is why I need them to be inside the mesh itself somehow :confused:

Are you planing on using UE4?

Well if I can import my meshs in it without losing the lightings and texture assignement yes sure.

You can’t export your lighting, but as long as you use the basic material type and you use the correct texture formats (try PNG or TGA, at resolutions that are multiples of 2: 256x256, 512x512, 1024x1024, etc.) then you can export just fine from Maya using the FBX format.

But I placed over a thousand lightings in Maya, I would need to redo them all ?

Those lights won’t go to UE4, UE4 can manage it better anyways.

I’m sorry I’m a bit confused, if I can’t get my lights from Maya to UE4, how can I get what I want without re-making all the lights in UE4 ?

You’re supposed to use the lighting system in UE4, if you know how to code then you could make a tool to use baked lighting from Maya, or to replicate your lights in UE4, but if not then there’s no way for you to use lighting from Maya.