lightmapper question?

Miscellaneous Forums/Content Creation Tools/lightmapper question?

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Giles 2 ( http://www.frecle.net/index.php ) seem pretty good, but for perfect lightmaps you need to take some time and adjust a ton of settings. It´s one of the very few solution that supports adaption of smoothing in lightmaps. Not for free.

Slimshady cannot handle alpha and masked textures, makes it useless for me. (Tho I still use the nonpublic version 0.5 to position and merge meshes, then export with lights for giles import). http://www.melog.ch/slimshady/

lmmaker039.exe (mentioned in an earlier posting) is recognized as malware by Antivir, not sure if it´s really dangerous, but I wouldn't run it.

Maplet (from Blitzresearch) has excellent lightmaps, but cannot import meshes and is limited to the primitives of the CSG modeller (no spheres, cones etc. one way export path)

Any fullfledged 3D modeller like Blender may be able to do lightmaps, you only need to work out a converter path to B3D. That said, blender has a hard learning curve.
http://lf.mmdevel.de/lf/documentation/lightmaptutorial/Blender2Lightfeather.html


There's DeleD ( http://www.delgine.com/ ) , that contains a lightmapper as well, although some people say it was "inadequate", but decide for yourself.

Then there´s FSRad, not tried yet, but looking promising:
orig: http://www.paulnettle.com/pub/FluidStudios/Radiosity/FSRad-004.zip
(some say not easy to use, no smoothing as giles)
(orge mod:) http://www.horza.de/OgreFSRad.shtml#overview
(other modded version:) http://www.geocities.com/dxlab/tmp/fsrad.html


Then threre´s IrrEdit, very promising. Allows to import a lot of formats, but lacks of useful export formats, maybe somebody´s gonna write a B3D export plugin? :
http://www.ambiera.com/irredit/features.html


then there´s NVIDIA´s gelato, can be used to lightmap,tho probably only on NVIDIA GPUs
http://blogs.nvidia.com/gelato/2007/01/gelato_21_candi.html
as discussed here:
http://www.ogre3d.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=186633&sid=ce193664e1d3d7c4af509e6f4e2718c6

Then there's 3delight:
http://www.3delight.com/index.htm
also discussed in the mentioned forum thread.

Then there´s kerkythea:
http://www.kerkythea.net/joomla/
Excellent radiosity, tho not sure if it can export anything at all.

Then there´s halos/leadwerks 3D world studio. not for free.
http://www.leadwerks.com/

Then there´s nitrogen (promising!!)
http://www.nitrogen.za.org/projectinfo.asp?id=18

Then there's "World", made for the DBPro ppl, but may be useful too:
http://world.mapmasterz.com/

lightbulb has vanished, as well as the several releases of elas_t, where Phosphore featured radiosity, but he had to stop working on it for the sake of his medical study - good for our health, bad for our toolpark.

Other than that, I'd try to google, maybe there' something new around.