Hi, I'm not an artist myself so please forgive my noobishness if I say anything stupid :) I'm working with an artist, and he's trying to export lightmaps from 3DS Max. It works fine, but they're not being exported in a memory efficient format. Here's what he's exported so far, this is an experiment of trying to lightmap a box: diffuse map (yes, it's just a solid purple)-- lighting map-- So, I think there are 2 problems here: 1. The diffuse map should be just 1 texture which is applied to all 6 faces of the cube. So like, 1 big 64x64 texture which is solid purple. But instead, he made a 256x256 texture which contains space for all 6 walls... This takes up too much memory though, we just want ONE texture that gets tiled. 2. The lighting map has a lot of blank space in it. I'm not very knowledgeable about lightmapping, but I thought most lightmappers at least pack lightmaps together to minimize empty space in the texture. By the way, to generate these lightmaps, he is using something called "Render to target" So, is it possible to generate optimal lightmaps in 3DS MAX? If so, does anyone know how it's done, so I can tell the artist I'm working with? Thanks very much, roos

Okay, the way 3DS-MAX does the unwrapping/packing during render to texture operations takes a little understanding.

First of all, tel him to make sure 'Automatic UV unwrap' is checked. If it is, then it's time to use a different tactic, because that's what's causing your main problem. If it's not, give it a try.

3DS-MAX has several UV coordinate 'channels'. By default, 'Render To Texture' does an automatic UV unwrap into map channel 3, but if you disable the automatic unwrapping, you can put your own UV map into channel 3 and it will use that.

Put a UVW Unwrap modifier on your object, and set its mapping channel to 3. Now, unwrap the object normally and space out the faces as you please. Now when you do the Render To Texture, it should use your custom coordinates.

It's a bit of a pain I know, but the UVW Unwrap modifier has some useful options for automatic unwrapping and packing. If doing them manually gets a bit annoying, try using these.

Thanks so much man, it helps out a lot :)

Tbh I have no clue what UVW unwrap is ;) But my partner's got a lot of experience w/ 3ds max so I guess I'll leave the rest to him ^_^ Think I'm gonna start learning gmax too, from what I hear it's a good tool for learning 3ds max other than buying 3ds max itself...