Converting Architectual Lighting and Materials

I have the basics of an interior scene with mutiple architectual materials and lighting that was built before using Ogre/Ofusion. A screenshot can be viewed at http://www.dmw.ca/projects/office/imgs/office_04.jpg

I have just begun experimenting with Ofusion and would like to know what the best method is, or if there are any tutorials out there for converting an existing max scene that uses architectual materials and lighting into an "Ofusion friendly" one, or must I go the route of baking my lighting solution?

Maybe a little of both. Baked and dynamic, at least to get the same lighting effects.

Thanks for the quick response.
Just so I understand...Ofusion doesn't translate a radiosity solution directly (certainly not in real time! - I just meant being able to work directly with the radiosity calcs done in Max) and, that one needs to go through the manual process for each entity of baking the lighting into another channel over the existing material?

If so, is there anything one needs to know ahead of time for doing this with multi sub-object materials?

You can bake the lighting to shell materials, so you can still modify and update the radiosity if you need to fine tune it later, and use the baked lightmaps in ogre

If your lighting dont need to be dynamic, then it should be baked to lightmaps, but dont bake reflections or other dynamic effects, they can be created with other settings or with shaders to mantain the dynamic nature

You need to create the lightmaps and the color maps separately, dont create them as a "complete map" where all is baked to the texture, but create the lightmaps with only the light/shadow data, this texture can be very small as as the filtering and multitexture process will produce great results

The color maps (the diffuse texture) should not be baked but a normal texture that can be tiled when possible to improve the memory usage and performance

Then you create an Ogre material with a single pass and with two texture units, the lightmap and the diffuse texture, and set the blending mode to modulate to create the effect

As a suggestion, if you scene is small or if you can control the target hardware where the scene will be displayed, you can test baking "complete maps" so you dont need to create multitexture materials or any other setup, just bake the complete maps and preview them

The problem with this setup is that if your textures storage size is bigger that the texture memory of the video chip in your hardware, it will affect the performance as the textures will need to be swapped when needed for display and this can create a performance issue

This tutorial was created for a client with similar needs as your case, the lighting was created in FinalRender and automatically baked with the standard max bake process:

Support Tutorial 1299_00

Thank you VERY MUCH! The info and tutorials are excellent. Not to mention near real time response. Wow.

You don't know how much head scratching and hair pulling you just saved! (well, you probably do)

BTW, when we first saw Ofusion, we pretty much wet our collective pants. After working with several commercial engines, we were left with somewhat of a bad taste and began exploring other options. One big thing for our little shop is to be able to streamline the production pipeline as much as possible - and Ofusion seems to be just the ticket for that.

I'll post our results as we progress...and thanks again!!!