Lighting

VisuAll provides both static and dynamic lighting.

Static lighting
With static lighting you can "bake" lighting information in three ways:

1. Simple complete bake
Light and shadow information are baked into the original diffusemap. This is a well known and quite good looking general technique. However the method often results in both a lower detail in the diffuse part and an overall bigger amount of texture memory used.

2. Normal lightmapping
By baking a separate lightmap, that is blended with the original diffusemap, you can preserve the finer details in the original diffuse map. However this technique is often difficult to both overbright and darken the final result.

3. Advanced lightmapping
Bake a separate lightmap and darkmap, which applied to the original diffusemap will both preserve the original detailed diffusemap, darken and lighten the final result.

Advanced lightmapping example
One of the benefits of working with advanced lightmapping is the one-to-one mapping between what you render in Max and what you experience in VisuAll.
See the images below where one is rendered in 3D Studio Max and the other is a screenshot from VisuAll.

Left: advanced lightmaps in Max. Right: advanced lightmaps in VisuAll

Static vertex light
Some models can benefit from having lighting information baked into the geometry. Furniture is one example where a highly detailed model is better off having the lighting information located per vertex than in a separate map or in the diffusemap.

Dynamic light
For simpler cases where fast results are wanted it is also possible to work with dynamic vertex lighting.
With this technique all light is calculated at run-time, making it rather simple to create a scene, add some lights and experience it in VisuAll.
The technique isn't as visually stunning as working with pre-baked light. For sketches or productions that are on a budget, however, this technique could be an easy way to make the model stand out.