so... ya. I've spent a lot of time on this map and there are a lot of rooms and shadow-casting things and tones of light sources. i think tool is faster then sapien so i ran light maps instead of radiosity (witch are the same things but in different programs.) and it's only gone from 0.7 to 0.2 over night.

any tricks or tips to make this go any faster?

get a better processor or overall computer
ive ran lightmap tests on coldsnap on my new dell and it got it done within a few mins

the dual cores are especially good at this

edit:

try setting the radiosity qualiy to 0 (not much of a difference between that and 1)

in sapien, which you should use in the first place, press ~ and type in radiosity_quality 0 then hit enter

tha tmight speed things up, but sapien in some cases is faster than tool

Edited by AHS_SONIC on Aug 29, 2008 at 01:51 AM

I appreciate the response and your time but I'm looking for advanced answers that don't involve getting a new computer. I know there might not be any but I think it's worth the thread.

again, you can try doing it in sapien, which in my opinion is faster than tool, and setting the radiosity quality to 0.

that speeds things up considerably

Also, tool lightmaps are not the same as sapiens radiosity.

They don't look as nice, with errors in the shadows.

Errors in the shadows is either a problem with the shaders' lighting properties or faces in the BSP that cause lighting errors. Running radiosity in Sapien should have no differences compared to running lightmaps in Tool. It's the same process.

Really...maybe it's just me then. My sapien radiosity always seems to look better.

but in sapien it shows you what it's doing, witch takes possessor time and ram space that could have been used to render the next pass faster.

Edit:
is there any way to save the lightmap in tool before it finishes? I know ^c cancels it but I don't think it saves it...
Edited by yukonmuffin on Aug 29, 2008 at 06:49 PM