DeleD Community Edition

[nextdoorscat]

Hi,

Just getting to know the LITE version, and have a couple of queries.

1) Sometimes, after lighting a scene, if I want to save and exit and then work on it again at a later date, the lightmap disappears. This has meant that the lighting has to be rendered again. Once I have also seen a warning box saying that the lightmap bmp could not be found and a dummy lightmap was generated.

2) I imported a textured object in 3DS format, it looked fine. I rotated it and moved it into position in the scene, and saved the scene. However, when reopening the scene later I found the object to be mangled.

Please let me know if these are known problems, or if there is something I need to do.

Kind regards

[Paul-Jan]

Ad 1)
- Make sure you are in 'lightmapped' mode. By default the application starts up in 'textured' mode, so you don't actually see any lightmaps until you press F4. That might have caused some confusion.
- When rendering a lightmap, the lightmap data is actually overwritten on the spot. That means that if you DO re-render the lightmap but DON'T save the scene, the scene and the lightmap will be out-of-sync. That might indeed trigger 'lightmapXXX.bmp not found' and other warnings, as well as the lighting looking all wrong. Also, renaming your scene will cause any lightmaps rendered so far to be 'lost'.

Besides these issues (that are hard to avoid with semi-persistent lightmaps), there are no known problems. If you don't think any of the above explains the behavious you witnessed, we'll have to investigate further.

Just don't try lighting large scenes with the Lite version, your lightmaps will become huge.

Ad 2) What do you mean exactly by 'mangled'? Could it be that the 3DS you imported was really (really) small, and you imported it with a small scale-factor? DeleD does save its vertex coordinates as integers, so if you work with sub-scale objects rounding errors might play a role when reloading. If that seems a likely explanation, try using a larger scale factor when importing, and see if that helps.

Thanks for reporting these issues by the way, very much appreciated!

[nextdoorscat]

Thankyou, your answer on lightmapping does explain the problems I was experiencing. And thanks for the tip about saving after each re-render, and about renaming files.

With the mangled object, some of the geometry had become distorted, and/or missing, and the texturing was affected. After your response I tried importing my 3DS object at 10 times the original size, and this also solved the problem.

Many thanks!

[Jeroen]

Glad to see these issues resolved. About the vertices being saved as integer, we will most likely start to save them as floating point numbers somewhere in a future version (>1.3 i think).

[Paul-Jan]

Yeah, it's just one of these legacy things that keep turning up. Although there are certain (I won't go into details here) other packages that also still save their vertice data as integers

[nextdoorscat]

Yes, I know of at least one other...

Sorry to be a pest but will this change? Just want to know as it will affect the scale of my worlds eventually.

Obviously if the models were remade in DeleD at the same scale, would this problem still occur?

Thanks!

[Paul-Jan]

Yeah, if you work on a tiny sub-integer scale with DeleD the problem can be reproduced, although DeleD doesn't really make it easy for you to model at such small scales.

Now for the good news: we definitely plan to get rid of this limitation, probably somewhere around DeleD 1.4 / 1.5 . I can't be very specific about when that will be at this point, let me stick to "near future", as opposed to "distant future"

Oh, and you are definitely not a pest. Getting constructive feedback from the user community is a sheer bless (especially compared to what we are used to at our dayjobs)