Optimised Texture Baking

[chris2307]

To further elaborate on my question (Sorry the original question was maybe a bit sparse .I was a bit tired at the time of writing this!):

1. I have rendered out lightmaps so I am able to use the original texture for my floor, whilst maintaining a good resolution for shadows. This works a lot better. However, I lose the colour of the lighting I created in 3DS Max, which I guess is to be expected as the lightmap is only used to calculate the brightness of the texture. Is there a way to add a subtle colour to the entire scene in order to mimic this? If not available to do in Vizard, could I write this as a shader instead?

2. I've also been reading around the subject and see that a drawback of baking complete textures is that it's difficult to do with large scenes. Has anyone else worked with large, realistic looking scenes in Vizard and tackled a similar problem? I seem to be having a catch 22 moment.

3. I was thinking about writing a shader which works out lighting and shadows for me but I have never used OpenGL before or written a shader (I am originally from the DX camp). Would this realistically be my best bet though?

Thanks