Hey, I''ve got a modelled nyclike city. I want to create lightmaps for it. In order to do so I want to give it proper unique uv''s. Max5 & 6 have a tool for this called Flatten Mapping. It seems to totally not be up to the task of unfolding a complicated city however. Our largest problem with it is that it splits up two faces of a quad in the uvmap, while they are coplanar in the world geometry, causing ugly artifacts across the edge of those two triangles. I''m looking for an alternative to generating UV''s for the city, and can''t seem to find anything very useable for my purposes. FSRad seems most promising, but I''m hoping not having to take the lightmapping code from FSRad and turn it into a max plugin. It''s just very hard to believe I''m the only one having this problem. How do other people generate UV coordinates for their levels? Does anyone happen to have a plugin / tool that does this reasonably. I''m very interested in anything that will take me less time than a max plugin of Paul Nettle''s FSRad. Thanks, Lucas

I have asked myself this very question. Most of the time, people say something along the lines of "make your own tool" but it isn''t that simple if your new to light maps. One program I''ve found though is Gile(s). I think it might be exactly what your looking for. Unfortunately, it is not free...

http://www.frecle.net/giles/

Another one. Haven''t used it tho.
http://www.windssoft.com/

Not much help but... we use our own UV-er as part of our custom exporter...

Eric Chadwick
http://www.whatif.info

Hehehe, Hey Eric

I heard of that tool, but we ended up making our own too.

My home solution is to take that into consideration when the model is built. If your engine can handle 2 UV''s per vertex, then maybe you can apply that shadowmap as an overlay in a new UV channel and leave the hand-built UV''s alone.

Lamont G.
CG Artist
San Diego CA
http://www.digitalweapon.net