Glow maps or Light maps aren't a form of lighting really. They work in a similar way to your Team Color (actually they work nearly identically). Basically it is an additional map (or Alpha Channel) used to denote portions of the texture that will remain "lit".
Lightmaps (aka Emissive maps) are
critically important to Glest. Although not on the same level of importance as Specular and Normals, Lightmaps are up there when we take a look at improving the graphics pipeline.
Why are they important?
-Windows. At night windows glow. Take a look at any modern game and you will notice faint glows coming from windows.
-Magical effects on creatures, glowing eyes, elementals.
The Inevitable city in Warhammer Online; Note the glows coming off the windows. This is simply a grey scale texture with areas masked as to where they will glow.
Click Me!Note the "glow" coming off the texture over the model.
Click Me!This is what an emissive map looks like:
[Edit] Most engines that do emissive maps will use a greyscale texture. More modern engines (UDK, Source, etc) can do Color Emissive maps as well as Color specular. They can also do like 20+ other types of "maps" (Environmental, Parallax, etcetera).
Environmental maps are used to fake reflective surfaces that a user won't be looking up close at. Car bodies, plate armor, swords, metallic surfaces etc. Not really good for water, but you can also use it for "simple" water. They are really complicated in terms of how they work programming wise and I do not expect to see such a feature in glest for now. Again, they work like any other map that masks a region of the texture (like the Team color). Except instead of showing texture, those areas masked reflect a reference texture (simple), or reflect a skybox (complex).
Psychedelic_hands
It depends on the model, usually I start in Max with the silloutte before moving over to Mudbox for the highress. Some peices are done in Max using SubD, organic stuff like bodies, heads, cloth, etc. is done in Mudbox. For the marine since I was in a hurry I did the whole body first in SubD, exported and then did all the details in Mudbox before retoping and moving back to Max.
best regards to all!
