You can bake any kind of lighting that you produce in Max with render to texture dialog window. You can produce GI sort of lighting with default max lighting using its several ways for that...Or fake the effect at least.. Ie: Skylight, area lights, the rendering radiosity settings, etc.
Final render, Brazil , are very good GI external ($) renderers. yet though, you can achieve very good GI lighting with Max only.
Giles does produce GI lighting, and of course, lightmaps of that.
FSRad does it too, and the tool Murphy is doing, surely also.
The fact is...Fsrad and Murphy's new incoming tool also cares for automatic lightmapping and packing, which(I mean, the UV making for channel 2, lightmap channel(in max usually channel 3)) can get to be such an issue for when doing a lightmapping for a whole town in Max, for example. And fsrad indeed removes u that ugly extra work of doing the uvs -well- for lightmaps. yet though, not supporting curved meshes for smooth shading, made me forget it.
@Iaro *.x I think can support vertex colors, if that u asked. At certain company, we used vertex colors for extra lighting(mainly for details, bulbs, etc) after we had already produced cool GI lightmaps.
Then seems that's one lowdown of LLMAKER, it slows down with hi meshes....well, quite common thing, anyway, and even in expensive comercial packages. Even more with GI renderings. yet so I found fsrad quick and nice in comparison-
Anyway, lightmappers tend to be slow. Is a thing to expect.
Anyway, a tip: maybe divide in chunks? just lightmap by modules. The total trick is be able to use a lighting and seamless lightmaps (manual uvmapping, probaly) so that your modules can be just used like "bricks" to build your city or level. This way you only lightmap those small chunks, like a pair of houses+chunk of street.Or so.It probaly needs later on careful 2d edit of lightmaps, and so, careful previous uv mapping of channel2 UV, so that you can understand the template later on and 2d edit...yet so, depends a lot on how you set the lights.
@afecelis. Then one could use tools like OBJ2MIM of Murphy. As you can like with giles, convert those *.x to *.OBJ, and MIM file would be pretty similar to what dhenton has just done: a mesh with 2 uv channels, a texture attached to uv channel 1, a lightmap tga attached to uv channel 2. He says it tell Irrlicht to use its lightmapping feature. So, that's all. Or said in other way: nothing to worry, what I understand of Dhenton did is simply make life way easy, a format like MIM.
I personally like a lot the obj2mim thing, as I can sepearately edit the objs in tools that do not support 2 uv channels (ie: Blender)
So basically, looks like dhenton loader actually loads everything needed in irrlicht
mesh, texture, lightmaps, the 2 uv channels, and actually does use it as a lightmap.
