Check this out. I redid the lightmaps for the interior of DC Sea Rigs.
l doing some last minute tweaks and have to import all the m2 meshes so they will get lightmapped to match. But the new lightmaps make the interior look more
realistic. It's also higher quality.
Here's a few screenshots: (this are renders from Max, but thus far the ingame result is pretty dam close to what the renders look like, so consider them the same thing.
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The only noticeable difference between the max renders and the ingame test results is the quality and the wall/ceiling light meshes. Ingame the cieling/wall lights are bright white (as they should be) but in max they are not. I made sure to hid the light bulb meshes so they won't cause shadows since lightbulbs themselves don't cast shadows very well.
The initial test was with 512x512. But it wasn't quite to my liking. I'm upping it to 1024x1024. It should look really well after that. Once I get the M2 meshes done, I will post ingame screenshots of the results.
Don't get me wrong. The DC devs did good with the lighting. But in my opinion the lighting they did wasn't as realistic. Mainly because they added lights to areas that have no visible light source (aka a lamp, ceiling light etc).
I added light objects only at locations that had visible light fixtures. The one exception is the group8 interior section. It lacked light fixtures in that entire room and I thought it would be a bit too dark. So I added 3 lights to it. The last of the images I posted above shows the effect of the light going through the vent things that lead to the upper area of that room.