I am going to add lightmaps to my little engine, but I dont know how to generate them. Where can I find som information on it?

It''s my understanding that lightmaps are generated at map-compile time, not at run time. Lightmaps are simply shortcuts for doing lighting calculations and make for nice shadow effects, ala Q3. Basically what you''d have to do is have a map compiler for your engine, and at compile time, it would do raytracing, and generate lightmap textures, and texture coordinates for these. It''s not so much a lightmap as a dark map, because you aren''t going to be making lightmaps where there aren''t any shadows. What you''re making is ''dark'' maps to do, pretty much the same effect as a multiply layer effect in Photoshop. So what looks like nice, fuzzy shadows, is actually a multi-textured effect, not a run-time ligting effect.

theres a tutorial on lightmaps at www.flipcode.com

Edited by - TapeWorm on December 31, 2000 3:32:59 PM