I can not see a real advantage to use lightmapping. I textured a square prop in my Poser 4. I added the lights, I rendered it an finally I exported the .bmp file, to be used as a normal texture,instead of multitexturing in the opengl engine. It should be better. Am I wrong?

nothing wrong with that, if you want to have a different texture for every single polygon in the whole damn scene.

lightmaps were designed because 1) they take up bugger-all space in memory (most lightmaps are 64x64), and secondly, you only need one texture which can be shoved on to of any other texture in the scene (wood, metal, etc).

twice in the same day i end up posting this link:

nate.scuzzy.net

somewhere in there is a couple of cool demos on lightmapping. read them, and be amazed at the amount of textures that are re-used, the color-changing lights, and more importantly, moving lights.

you might as well pre-render the whole scene from every concievable angle and position possible.

oh, and no-one said you had to multi-texture. look at the tuts to see what i mean.

MENTAL