Hiya John!
We are assuming that your friend wants real-time useage, or static render useage. That would be useful to know. Also an idea of the number of polygons he needs because that would definately alter my answer.
For low polygon count models OR breaking a huge model down into smaller parts I would use:
Gile[s]
Results are fantastic if you play with the settings and get to know the lighting well. Nothing comes for free! :)
Products such as 3D Studio Max (which does fantastic rendered lighting) makes loads and loads and loads of extra textures when it lightmaps, so for real-time use it becomes to 'texture expensive'.
BUT beware Gile[s] may not load very large models! You should do some tests first, also medium sized models with loads of textures will be slow. I have even known it to lock up completely under these circumstances.
B3d exclusively for B3d stuff. Gile[s] copes with a great number of file formats, I know Fedbourg uses .ASE for some of his stuff, which may be useful for your CAD guy.
What is great about Gile[s] is how easy it is to break down a large model and assign a number of different lightmaps of varying sizes to each of your models. If your friend needs a town lighting for example, you probably could not achieve that in Gile[s] (depending upon the polygon count and texture count), as one model...
...what you could do is break the town into smaller quadrants and light each of these separately. Because you can load a lights set up and merge stuff, you can slowly lightmap each quadrant with the same lights in place, adding details where you need it and turning shadows off where you can't see them.
IPete2.
We are assuming that your friend wants real-time useage, or static render useage. That would be useful to know. Also an idea of the number of polygons he needs because that would definately alter my answer.
For low polygon count models OR breaking a huge model down into smaller parts I would use:
Gile[s]
Results are fantastic if you play with the settings and get to know the lighting well. Nothing comes for free! :)
Products such as 3D Studio Max (which does fantastic rendered lighting) makes loads and loads and loads of extra textures when it lightmaps, so for real-time use it becomes to 'texture expensive'.
BUT beware Gile[s] may not load very large models! You should do some tests first, also medium sized models with loads of textures will be slow. I have even known it to lock up completely under these circumstances.
B3d exclusively for B3d stuff. Gile[s] copes with a great number of file formats, I know Fedbourg uses .ASE for some of his stuff, which may be useful for your CAD guy.
What is great about Gile[s] is how easy it is to break down a large model and assign a number of different lightmaps of varying sizes to each of your models. If your friend needs a town lighting for example, you probably could not achieve that in Gile[s] (depending upon the polygon count and texture count), as one model...
...what you could do is break the town into smaller quadrants and light each of these separately. Because you can load a lights set up and merge stuff, you can slowly lightmap each quadrant with the same lights in place, adding details where you need it and turning shadows off where you can't see them.
IPete2.