Light mapping is a technique that allows you to compute illumination and other surface information from an object’s material, and output that information to a texture file that can be used elsewhere in your scene.
Softimage uses light mapping in two ways:
• In shaders that use lightmaps internally to store illumination information. For example, the fast subsurface scattering material phenomena use lightmaps to store information about light scattered in an object. For more information, see Fast Subsurface Scattering [Lights and Cameras].
• Lightmap shaders that write the results of the lightmap computation to an external texture file that you can then reuse in the scene.
- If you are creating fast subsurface scattering effects from “scratch” or by using the SSS shader compounds, you will have to generate your own lightmaps using the Fast Subsurface Scattering Lightmap Write shader [Shader Reference]. For how to do this, see Generating Lightmaps for the SSS Component Shaders and Generating Lightmaps for the SSS Compounds [Lights and Cameras].
- The Color Sampler shader is described in the next section: Using the Color Sampler Shader.
Autodesk Softimage v.7.5