Lightmapping for actors

[Gamespider]

Well.. How can I? Basically i want it because I want to use the actor LOD system and dont want to sacrifice the lighting either.....
Is there any workaround?

[QuestOfDreams]

what does the actor LOD system have to do with lightmaps? actors don't have lightmaps at all...

[Gamespider]

I want to have staticmeshes instead of level geometry to make use of the LOD system. But since they use per vertex lighting, the lighting appears too blocky.

[GD1]

lightmapping is simply per-vertex lighting. when you lower the lightmap scale you increase the number of polygons rendered in the scene. you can do the same thing by simply sub-dividing your static meshes (not recomended).

[AndyCR]

sorry to correct you, but actually, lightmaps are textures that are either multiplied or added (cant remember which, i believe multiplied) by the original textures. so they are simply textures generated by the compile process, whereas actor lighting is per-vertex and not per-pixel. not entirely sure the formula for vertex lighting.

[GD1]

There are two kinds of lightmaps in RF, the kind that splits level geo based on polygons, and the kind that supplies a texture(EMBM). If you turn on the framerate counter and look around the level you will find that the poly count increases based on the lightmap scale of the level geo.

you should look into EMBM specular maps for SEP's, which are essentially the kind of lightmap AndyCR is talking about. i've used this however and the only real application i saw was glow effects, but hey, knock yourself out.

[Gamespider]

Embm means the target system would be geforce 3 or above. I was aiming something for Geforce 2.

Static meshes slow down when The poly count is higher than about 500.
So can I achieve respectable lighting on actors by subdeviding them and then loading them as SEPs

[Jay]

Keep in mind that SEPs don't have per-poly-collision, so be sure your actor isn't too big and has no 'holes'.