You can use tiling on the original texture - just render a shadowmap instead of complete texture.
In my experience, Max5's automatic UV mapping is pretty efficient. Personally, I think the benefits of letting the artist use a very powerful tool that they're already comfortable with far outweigh the drawbacks. It's the reason a lot of game companies are starting to integrate their level design tools into 3dsMax (they address the efficiency problem by taking advantage of Max features like instancing and grouping to define regions - features that I'm planning on supporting in B3d Pipeline :) )
Sure a level made in Maplet might be terribly, super-duper efficient, but that only half of the problem...
-Pudding
In my experience, Max5's automatic UV mapping is pretty efficient. Personally, I think the benefits of letting the artist use a very powerful tool that they're already comfortable with far outweigh the drawbacks. It's the reason a lot of game companies are starting to integrate their level design tools into 3dsMax (they address the efficiency problem by taking advantage of Max features like instancing and grouping to define regions - features that I'm planning on supporting in B3d Pipeline :) )
Sure a level made in Maplet might be terribly, super-duper efficient, but that only half of the problem...
-Pudding