My main beef with my initial results was that many of the shadows looked kind of blocky, which killed a lot of potential realism (see previous entry). I realized this was because of two factors: the lumels (the 'pixels' of the lightmap texture) were large, and that if the change in brightness between two adjascent lumels is large enough, the blocks will be visible to the viewer. Therefor, my options were either to make the lumels smaller, or decrease the change in brightness between adjascent lumels.
Presently the entire lightmap for a level is stored on one 256x256 texture, and each lumel is 8x8 units. To give you an idea of relativeness, each tile in the world is 32x32 units. I really like how small this keeps the memory footprint, so I didn't want to change the lumel size. Instead, I opted to apply a smoothening algorithm to reduce the sudden changes in brightness between lumels. This was a little tricky, since a lightmap for a level might look something like this:
As you can see, there is no real sense of "adjascency", since no planar relationship between faces is preserved in the final lightmap. This means a simple smoothening algorithm would cause artifacts near the edges, where two faces meet, since the smoothening is done independently from each adjascent edge. And, well, this problem is apparent in some of the screenshots if you look for it. I'll keep an open mind about solving the problem, but failing that, I intend to work around it as best I can. It's an inherently tricky problem to solve, given how the data is presently managed.
Without further ado, here are some shots which showcase the aforementioned features:
Other additions include a desk model, a better wood texture, and a coffee-coloured tile texture. Not AAA quality, but it's a level of quality that I'm mostly satisfied with for the project. My current toolset is GIMP, Blender, and KolourPaint; I'm hoping to improve my art as I continuously get more practice.
Until next time. [smile]
