Baking a light map to a texture, Without this feature 3d characters will look rather flat without depth in a 3d games engine.
So the question im asking is what programs exist out there to do this task of baking a texture map?
you can use the 'render to texture' option on max to bake lighting into your texture. but you should paint a fiar bit of the lighting in to start with, and with higher poly models and new engines using better realtime lighting, normal mapping, and other shadders, lighting in textures is becoming less and less important.
what 3d package do you use?
EDIT: ahh, Wings3D according to your portfolio. never heared of that one.
if your looking for work or serious about 3d it would be a good idea to learn 3dsmax or maya. not that knowing a certain package will be nessessary to get a job (i was a max user and didnt start using maya until i was hired), but having an understanding of how either max or maya works would be a good idea none-the-less. modeling is pretty simular in both in the end anyway.
oh, and i dont know of any 3rd party program to bake in lighting
Actually I have a good understanding of maya did a course in it I just prefer to work in wings3d for the model part then transfer to Maya and do my animations and stuff there.
I was Just wondering if its possible to do lightbaking for games in maya to a texture? as alot of my knowledge of maya relates to animation and making animations that have never required lightbaking.
If I can remember correctly, 3dsmax comes inbuilt with that functionality and will save out the skin to a specific quality/size/type. But, I haven't used 3dsmax for ages :S