wow, old thread...
well, I allways that i give an advice is thinking on the listener can at the end reach the maximum quality if keeps at it. Giles is dunno if 39 or 50$..Is not much for many countries but depending among other things in money exchange, that can be a lot, I admit it. To me, it did worth the purchase. Is a bit more than a month of dsl connection...
Anyway, now that you retake this allways interesting matter...I was testing again Lmmaker 0.39, as u know, is free...well, I had sort of a nightmare to force it import as single surfeace, it keeps trying to break every triangle as a mesh a part...reason why may Afe did find it slow...in import, seems most formats are broken..At least I tried hard with OBJ , x, 3ds.There must be a trick, but i didn't discover it. Why was I fighting to it? To provide ppl a free fullmethod, as it has smoothing support, which also allows b3d export! Which would be terrificly good for the great Luke's B3d loader for irrlicht. Anyone not minding much the flatten shading (

) can use tho Slimshady, as it is fully free and outputs b3d levels.
Lmmaker can do lightmaps supporting smooth shading, which is great. But there seem to be no way to import as single piece meshes, so smoothing is impossible , at least in my tries...a royal pitty. I can perfectly output full b3d levels with unwrap3d and giles, is not for me, but users here. Indeed, would love if it'd load in Wine as well for linux users...If I get the way to import full piece objs from wings or Anim8or, I'll tell here....
A bit OT but interesting and related, anyway...
About fsrad partitioning system; absolutely superb, no doubt abaout that.
Anyway, I have lightmapped in 3ds max. You can customize the whole thing a lot and finally have small lightmaps covering all...
In Giles I am maybe less experienced, but maybe as it keeps it quite simple
Anyway, I'd like to have a test on the Niko's new lightmapper, whenever I have the time...but I think for now is only available in irredit. That'd surely be best way for irrlicht projects, as the connection is safely ensured.