I am no extreme savy when it comes to hardware requirement with new lighting techniques demo's I've just heard about a few months ago, but I never figured lightmass would require 50K in hardware? D: I thought that new multi-lightning rendering technique helped to that. Looks like I thought wrong.
Good luck with your project. I kind of envy it as I am a fanatic of clean and white-ish maps (Ask everyone here D: ). Being a somewhat novice-experienced modeler myself, I think I could pull up something really interesting with such lighting system. I'd be curious to see it implemented for something else, like much darker surfaces and so on, or yet even better, Ambient Occlusion. But it definitively work on white.
How long was the rendering for Hanging Gardens on that dual core CPU?
Lightmass (and Beast for that matter) follow the "click and pray" model... meaning you set your lights, press the button, and hope that the result works out. The demo at GDC was impressive, but they had a LOT of fast quadcores working on the scene at once (looked like somewhere in the 30 core range, for a very small scene). That amount of processing power is very achievable in a large studio setting, but can you imagine setting up lighting where each lighting change takes 4-8 hours to see on your local hardware? (I've heard some comments from Beast users as well where a small change could result in a 20+ hour bake, just to see if the change even worked).
pureLIGHT is iterative, and can work on sub-selections and inviduals meshes So, for this scene (with all the expensive object light sources) a single pass is ~ 15 minutes on my laptop, but any change I wanted to preview would take about 1 or 2 minutes on its own. (during this time, you can actually see the bake happen, so if something is wrong you usually know in 30 seconds or less). This quick preview process lets me get the lighting perfect, at which point I setup a bake overnight. I cheated a bit by letting the final bake use a few of the quadcores at my office, but as _N_ can attest to the first stage lighting he saw was fairly resolved and that was a single night on just my laptop. Because of the iterative process, you can start and stop a bake several times; this scene could have easily been done over 3 nights on just this laptop, with usable results after the first session. (the ability to bake individual meshes is also a big deal, as I had finished the bar early on and basically didn't need to touch it for the rest of the project. I also had to change some of the flagbase areas, and could bake thouse without needing to rebake the struts, floor, etc).
We will be putting up a workflow video on the pureLIGHT site in the next week or so.
As for darker surfaces, I find that the lighting tends to get lost - this works well for games (therefore needing less in terms of quality indirect illumination), but personally that's why I end up on the lighter end of the spectrum. That said, I have seen some impressive dark projects with pureLIGHT, ranging from a a storming WW2 harbor to a night-time refinery (with over 1200 small light sources), and both projects turned out really well.
We have used pureLIGHT (with only background light) to create some impressive baked in ambient occlusion for our simulation projects. Its a bit of overkill, but it works pretty good (and could be used for an interesting environment style, I suppose). The Unreal Ambient Occlusion post process effect is something entirely different but also pretty spiffy; I personally love how they used it in Gears 2. I do think that this post process based Ambient Occlusion would detract from an environment like HangingGardens though. The effect tends to make corners and such excessively dark, which looks great with small details and heavy textures but is very obviously "wrong" when viewed from a clean lighting perspective. (look up at your ceiling with the light on - the lighting where the wall meets the ceiling is smooth and consistent, it doesn't all of a sudden fade to blackness over the last 3 inches). Really though, both are very different effects; it all comes down to what sort of visuals you are trying to create.
We are still finalizing the details regarding the gaming version of pureLIGHT, but if you (or anyone else) are interested in using it on a project, feel free to send a note via the
pureLIGHT website. The integration with UT3 is a bit rough (compared to the support we added to Unreal 3 popper), but we might be able to works something out. Note that pureLIGHT is external to Unreal, so it would only effectively work on a scene built in an application like Max; don't expect to light stock assets or BSP with it. (note that hybrid scenes are fairly easy; HangingGardens uses pureLIGHT for the structure, and Unreal's own lighting for the cliff, rocks, and foliage).
Do people use splines to make curved walls? The only tutorials I see using spline are to make some cylinder type of object.
Almost all of the curves in HangingGardens started as splines, which were then extruded into poly objects. The bend modifier or similar would be really inappropriate for such shapes. I personally do not know of any good introduction tutorials for 3d Max - last time I looked for such was probably over 8 years ago now. I do highly recommend going down to your local bookstore (or some place like Amazon) and spending the $60 to buy a nice thick book on 3D Max. This book will only be te beginning, but it might be enough to get you past some of the initial hurdles. If you are considering this industry for a career, that $60 may be some of the best money you ever spend.
Hope that answers some questions!
A