Lets create a complex lightmap - Open discussion

[Hainzgrimmer]

@ZacD;524229

I decided to make a low poly mesh and bake it down, the main advantage for someone doing arch vis is you can use much lower light maps for most things (if you want nice contact shadows, you still need a pretty light resolution light map, but for anything else low resolution is fine). I used a 512 lightmap on the couch, and the Lightroom: Interior Day Light content example map. Low poly sofa is 30k tris. I did not use any textures, but you could easily add a tiling fabric texture. Normal map is 4096x4096, but honest 2048 holds up just as well at 1440p, even with close ups.

http://i.imgur.com/5QwHRKF.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/JqNONQu.jpg

Tomorrow I’m going to unwrap the original mesh, the FBX file is triangulated so it’s a pain to UV or fix, and trying to remove it isn’t perfect.

A few tips, for light map UVs, the less seams the better. More seams means more padding between the islands, which basically forces the texel density to be lower. Less seams also means less places for artifacts.

EDIT: One more image 1080p, with contact shadows.

http://i.imgur.com/UATl2NP.jpg

I’ll upload the low poly and normal map tomorrow as well.

This is huge!!! It’s an exeptional work!!!
Quick questions:

• have you made a low poly version of the pillows from 0 (you modeled them)? or did you use a method to optimize them? in this last case I tried in past the decimation (in Blender) or the ProOptimize (in 3dsMax) but I hadn’t liked so much the results (your meshes in the first post are simply perfect!), can I ask you which method did you use?

• this may be a dumb question: is better to “quadrify” the models before start working on them and at leave the “triangulate process” to unreal when we import them? in this case the “quadrify” command in 3ds max works pretty well so we could use it before start working!