Talk:Lightmapping levels

There was probably some thought behind rendering particles between the env and the shadow: Oni has no sharp shadows, and it allows the particles to be rendered in the same light\shading that the env is in.

...if that makes any sense. Gumby 21:05, 4 October 2010 (UTC)

No, this doesn't make sense, for at least N reasons.

1. An object can totally be in plain light even if there's a shadow somewhere behind it, along the line of sight. My screenshot is a good example of such a situation: the Screaming Cell is not behind the pillar, where the shadow lies, and yet in the rendering pipeline the sprite is "trapped" between the opaque env and the transparent shadow quads.
2. Most particles are various flashes and glows, which shouldn't be affected by shadows anyway.
3. Oni wasn't meant to support lightmaps, at least not in the hackish way that I've "implemented".
4. There are so many glitches in the rendering pipeline, it's not even funny. So, unintended, IMHO.

geyser 21:20, 4 October 2010 (UTC)

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Lightmapping looking good.

Here are my screenshots of the room. I hope the links don't break. (I can't upload to oni2.net at the moment.)

It doesn't look too good, actually. If you look carefully at the piece of furniture with 8 small screens, some of the smaller polygons are completely black, meaning there have not been enough radiosity iterations (or whatever) for them to receive any light. Or maybe it's another of Blender's radiosity settings, like the resolution of the hemicubes (or whatever). Probably fixable, but I can't claim victory until I've actually tried to fix it.

Another (related) problem is that for larger level parts, some rooms (e.g., staircases) stay dark even though there are light emitters in there. Looks like Blender can't handle too much radiosity in a single job, and overlooks those small rooms while overdoing bigger ones. So it looks like neither I nor anybody else will be lightmapping whole levels at once. It's more likely that we'll have to split them up into rooms (similarly to the AGDB partition).

There are other problems which I'm becoming aware of while looking at the original levels and preparing them for lightmapping. There's geometry that's messed-up (all the furniture in that room except the 8-screen thingy needed fixing; some trusses in the big halls of the warehouse; dunno what else). There are spots that are begging to be remodeled (but there's no time or workforce for that). And of course there are the objects with moving counterparts, which should be lightmapped sparingly if at all.

Thinking of all that, it seems very unlikely that a lightmapped Oni will be available by January, even if OniSplit becomes able to import doors and such. We'll have a bunch of teaser screenshots, at most. Then again, there's the case of new levels (arenas, mini-games, stuff like that). For those we can probably have a release (complete with lightmapping and pathfinding). Maybe I should just lightmap the arena, nicify it a bit, and leave this proof-of-concept business at that. Sigh.

geyser 02:18, 24 November 2010 (UTC)

Here's a comparison screenshot:

Warehouse no lightmap:

With lightmap

EdT 03:09, 26 November 2010 (UTC)