I've been working on the jail today [which is in the police station's basement]. I wish I had more time to work on it, especially the light maps, but I've only afforded myself 1 day to work on this, I was hoping to get the illegal gambling business finished today as well....but things dragged on. Numerous bugs in Milkshape3D & Light Map Maker, particularly the way it handles large groups of triangles > 30k...I'll spare the details, but I was going around and around just trying to get the 10000+ surfaces exported from light map maker into a single group in Ms3D, I ended up having to ues multiple groups, and export in steps, etc...what a pain...and I'm not 100% satisfied with the lightmaps which took about 20 min to generate.

It looks awesome with 1 light source...with 6 of them the lighting becomes confusing. I'm thinking it might be better to just seperate each gang into different rooms, verses having all the gangs in one common room, so they can see eachother. I'm sure once the player models are rendred the FPS will be shitty on most comps. My 8800 gets ~500 FPS with just one jail cell...with 6 I get about 200 FPS. @ 1280x1024 8x FSAA and full motion blur + bloom I get 120 FPS which is totally fillrate limited due to motion blur / bloom...ehhh.

Here is the final result...at least until I get more time to work on it....








The reference photos, I liked the bed from the alcatraz cell, the bars from the other cell, and I was really going for a large 'holding cell' look for the jail cells, since each gang will have their own cell.


And here is the step by step....


















Screenshot from Light Map Maker...I get like 0.01 FPS...but the results are good, so I can't really complain. They saved me a lot of time.


Nicely packed lightmaps...thanks Light Map Maker *thumbs up & cheesy smile*



Thats it for now...next 2 days will be spent writing code to handle all the basement stuff. Yay.

- Danny