Hello, 3d-io recently created another interesting plugin: Flatiron! http://flatiron.3d-plugin.com/ With Flatiron it's possible to bake lightmaps easily with optimally packed texture coords. The best thing about it: one doesn't have to attach all meshes in the scene just to be able to bake one big lightmap. Also available right now for testing is Packer: http://packer.3d-plugin.com/ With Packer, you don't have to arrange the chunks of your texture anymore, because it packs those for you in the best way possible (as it seems). I would love to hear how people here handle their lightmaps ... Last time I did them (for some hobby project) I changed my level in such way it consisted of six big meshes, all with their own lightmaps. I suppose that wasn't very good for performance, but didn't know any other way. Regards, Friedrich, 3d-io [Edited by - 3d-io on January 16, 2009 2:36:30 AM]

Those look like really good plugins!
Calculating shadowmaps for an entire scene in 3DSMAX is quite cumbersome, if I recall correctly ... so this should be a blessing! :)

We used Rendertotexture for a while but it has some problems and the support was hopeless.

I'm not sure if this is of use to you, but this is free:

http://www.frecle.net

Screenshots (only the first two are from the new version which has Ambient Occlusion): http://www.frecle.net/index.php?show=&section=giles⊂=screenshots