Beta and those interested post here

#81 The discount ends at the end of October.

#82 Hi David.

Any chance for a beta to test with another engine ? or a model w/ textures and lightmaps to test with (obj or dae format prefered).

As we discussed earlier, to test if its possible to use this program with Esenthel (it also supports lightmaps).

You said to try use the files comming with Torque3D (and i do have T3D pro license), but those are dts files and does not import into the mesh editor in Esenthel.

350$ or later 500$ isnt really in my budget if it does not work with our current chosen engine :P

#83 Bo, the output of pureLIGHT can be used with any engine that will light you import a Collada mesh with a 2 UVs. One for diffuse and one for lightmap. The lightmap is just a TGA. We could provide the tone mapping algorithm for you to integrate into the engine. Unfortunately for Vertex lit support you'd have to write a shader or add something to the renderer that supported vertex lighting in the format we output. We could provide the spec if you want. At this point we are looking into other engines, but I don't think we'll support Esenthel specifically. If you are looking to take the meshes out of T3D there isn't a lot I can do there besides suggest you use the Export Interiors function in T3D to get Collada models and then run them through pureLIGHT.

#84 I had a quick look at Esenthel here. The mesh editor can import in our exported ase and dae files (though the dae files are orientated along the wrong axis). Though I have no idea how to assign a texture to a material, so I don't know if the lightmaps work or not. I didn't see any options to use vertex colors at all, so you probably won't be able to use vertex-baked meshes.

Try importing in the Den Demo scene: http://demos.garagegames.com/3dinteractive/DenGold.zip and see if you can get it to work. The important meshes to get working are:
LM_Walls - A mesh with just a lightmap
LMA_Books - A mesh with a ton of submaterials
LM_Rug - A mesh with a diffuse texture and a lightmap
LMX_Floor - A mesh with 2 submaterials with different diffuse textures and a single common lightmap
VL_TeaSet - A vertex lit mesh

You can find files these in: Module_TOD_Day\ExportedLighting there will be an ase file for each mesh, and a tga texture for the lightmapped meshes.

#85 Hello everyone,

We're at the stage where we are ready to optimize and beautify our scenes. So it looks like we're getting pureLight! Yey!

I have one question that's crucial for us though. We have many dts shapes that we want to make lightmaps for. These are rooms and corridors. We want to lightmap each room one by one, since they are procedurally placed.

We also have an internal tool that directly works on a dts and changes its materials by editing the file in a binary manner. This results in a dts that does not have a source version that we could conveniently edit or import, so we thought that we'd try Torque 3D's collada export.

My question is the following: As far as I know, the "Export To Collada" option in Torque 3D does not export material information. Is this going to cause us any trouble? Are we going to be able to generate the lightmaps using pureLight using the dae exports without the material information? How will we be able to map the generated lightmap onto the original dts shapes?

Please forgive me if these questions are very basic. I'm a programmer, I know little about art and the workflows associated.

If what I explained would not be possible using pureLight, I'd rather expand the Torque 3D exporter and add material information to the exported .dae file somehow, than not go with pureLight or have to choose a 3rd party program to do anything. We don't have an inhouse artist, we outsourced all our art, for this, I'd rather not pay for additional exporting.

I'd be very thankful for any explanation and help you could give me in sorting this out. Perhaps pureLight can do this out of the box, and my conerns are not valid at all. I'm not familiar with pureLight yet - but I plan to be! :)

#86 I'm not entirely sure offhand if the export to collada option in Torque 3D exports materials or not. You can set up materials inside of pureLIGHT (course that's now a boring step to recreate your existing setup).

It would be possible to expand the Torque 3D exporter, the specification is here: http://www.khronos.org/files/collada_spec_1_4.pdf (though its probably easier to just look at some existing files and figure out the materials that way).

I'll have a look when I get back to work monday at what the Torque 3D collada exporter exports.

#87 Thanks Thomas, I'd appreciate that! As far as I see, it's just a bunch of triangles, but I might be wrong.

I'll get familiar with the collada specification and add materials if they are indeed missing from the shape to collada export feature. Also, I'll think of a way to be able to transport uv coords to an existing shape's second uv map.

#88 Finally got pureLight! Can't wait to see what it's capable of!

After doing a diff of the two collada files (interior collada export and generic collada export in Torque 3D) I saw that materials indeed don't get included in the latter.

I also checked the collada export in 1.0.1. (1.1 Beta 1 has a glitch that won't actually save the file - logged and being fixed atm) I see that the export functionality is there, the problem is that the vector that handles the material descriptions is not populated. That part is actually only written for interiors just yet.

I'll see if I can get it to work.

#89 Edit: Nevermind, got it.

#90 Hmm, that's unfortunate that it doesn't write out the materials. If materials are being exported in the interior collada export, that gives you a fairly good template to work with for getting it to work with the generic export.