Demystifying exporting light maps from 3ds Max to Vizard?

[dproeder]

Hey all.

So when following the steps in the Vizard documentation on baking and exporting light maps from 3ds Max I started wondering about a few things. I am an experienced Maya and Unity User so I kinda wanted to know whats being generated and whats being exported during this process.


Is 3ds Max creating a 2nd UV set with automatically laid UVs with a monochromatic light map?

Is 3ds max overwriting your current UVs and baking the lighting information directly onto your diffuse?

When you export the newly light baked models from Max to Vizard, what is being transfered?
Is it 2 separate maps such as a Light Map and your original Diffuse?
Is it 1 map with lighting baked directly into your diffuse?

How does vizard process this lighting information? When exporting with "lighting turned off", does vizard have any light source in its scenes? Are the light sources read from the exported lighting information from the osgb?


I am not a fan of 3ds Max's scene management. It is very difficult to work in a scene with many objects and a million+ triangle count. I would rather bake lighting in Maya and transfer over the baked meshes to 3ds Max in FBX form. Knowing how Vizard reads light map information will help me create this workflow.

Thanks from IVC Greenville!
-patrick