John
Apart from Max (which I don't have), there's bugger all else to choose from apart from Giles.
There's Lightmap Maker from windsoft.com, but it's interface is particularly unfriendly.
Cartography Shop has a built in LM. Last time I looked, it did the job, but would not lightmap imported non-cs created geometry (this might have changed by now)
There's various amateur freeware blitz produced LM's, but they all have problems.
Insight concepts was producing a LM called Luminescence3d which gave excellent results with minimal tweaking, however they seem to have discontinued development.
As for Giles, everyone raves about it, but I find it needs a lot of tweaking to get an acceptable render and it seems prone to artifacting when LM'ing my Lightwave generated geometry. I suspect this is because it likes nice regular output from editors such as Cart Shop, rather than the polygon soup from LW. However it does offer good control over group/surface LM settings and it's been wriiten with a view to Blitz integration.
Apart from Max (which I don't have), there's bugger all else to choose from apart from Giles.
There's Lightmap Maker from windsoft.com, but it's interface is particularly unfriendly.
Cartography Shop has a built in LM. Last time I looked, it did the job, but would not lightmap imported non-cs created geometry (this might have changed by now)
There's various amateur freeware blitz produced LM's, but they all have problems.
Insight concepts was producing a LM called Luminescence3d which gave excellent results with minimal tweaking, however they seem to have discontinued development.
As for Giles, everyone raves about it, but I find it needs a lot of tweaking to get an acceptable render and it seems prone to artifacting when LM'ing my Lightwave generated geometry. I suspect this is because it likes nice regular output from editors such as Cart Shop, rather than the polygon soup from LW. However it does offer good control over group/surface LM settings and it's been wriiten with a view to Blitz integration.