LightMapping in XSI 7

[Manticor]

Ok this is an old question but Im using XSI 7 to lightmap a city for a realtime application.
I discovered in the past that finalgather doesnt bake out correctly to textures as it only works from the fgmap generated from the camera view..... so would have to animate the camera and build up the fgmap.......I refuse to do this as it would take ages ...

So my question is this .... how to lightmap a good outdoor lighting setup that can be baked to textures without using final gather .HDR and emmisive materials only work with FG .

Do I create a lightrig for the sky and put point lights near emmisive surfaces .

Are there any other ways to work around this limitation.

Also is this limitation with FG baking in newer versions of softimage ?

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated

[Mathaeus]

Ok this is an old question but Im using XSI 7 to lightmap a city for a realtime application.
So my question is this .... how to lightmap a good outdoor lighting setup that can be baked to textures without using final gather .HDR and emmisive materials only work with FG .

There is a trick with MIA material, or derivative of MIA, to put reflection glossiness to zero and of course to set some significant number of glossy samples. In this zero glossiness case, MIA switches from reflection vector to diffuse distribution, MR behaves as sort of path tracer. You'll want both facing and perpendicular reflectivity to 1 for this. Reflection trace level in MIA became number of bounces.
I've used this a lot for baking to vertex colors,for bitmaps, I'm afraid, a sort of blurring in post should be done. From my experience, method works even with huge scenes, but never I've even tried to 'clean' the noise. Don't believe that MIA is assumed to work in this way...

[Manticor]

Thats fantastic matheus ,really appreciate the tip ,as now i dont have to port the scene to some other program .

Whilst searching for solutions i also found this other way of doing he same thing which uses the ambient occlusion node .But i think your solution should be better as this method doesnt have bounces .Im putting them both to the test tommorow when im back at work
http://www.derekjenson.com/2/post/2010/ ... tmaps.html

Many thanks again matheus

[Manticor]

I have found that the degrain node in the fxtree works wonderfully to eliminate noise using the MIA trick.