In user testing, the "Bake All" operator overwriting the "Col" layer was
blowing away too much manual shading, reducing the usefulness of the
feature severely. This changes us to using the "autocolor" layer and
making it a somewhat ephemeral coloring layer. Any "autocolor" layer
generated by the exporter should be removed when the export finishes.
Otherwise, it should persist.
You can now bake "finalized" lighting to either vertex colors or a
lightmap image. This can be done either from the toolbox or from the
individual lightmap modifier. The purpose of doing this is to allow the
artist to opt-into a workflow where they can chose when to incur the
performance penalty, instead of on export. The downside is that the
artist now has to manually click a bake button. But, for some Ages,
especially "finished" ones receiving small updates, there is no need to
rebake the lighting each export.
Blender can crash during export when baking vertex colors to shared mesh
data objects. Doing that can lead to lighting gotchas, but it's better
to have lighting gotchas than crashes.
The lightmap modifier is now a more general "Bake Lighting" modifier
that can control how vertex colors are baked as well. The default vertex
color baking behavior is unaffected. It is now identical to adding a
Bake Lighting modifier, changing it to bake vertex colors without
specifying a pass.
Given that the Plasma World (read: age) is defined per scene, it seems
appropriate to limit the export to the current scene. Other scenes could
potentially have other age definitions...
Due to our disabling of texture baking when lightmapping, Blender would
not be able to cast light through transparent materials. Now, we revert
back to something resembling the manual method of lightmapping from the
bad old days of PyPRP.
Do note that because we attempt to batch object baking as much as
possible, I have disabled baking lightmaps to transparent objects.
This is because the transparent objects would need its textures disabled
for it to be baked to, but with the textures disabled, the renderer
would be unable to correctly determine the object's transparency. D'oh!
It would be possible, I suppose, to move them into their own batch, but
that makes the state machine a bit more complex. It would be better to
wait for someone to need that functionality, I think.
For sanity, I stripped the progress manager into a subclass. From there,
I moved all of the progress printing into a thread so that we can accept
signals for step progress. If there is no step progress for a time, we
show the user a rolling set of ellipses to prove we're not dead (yet).
A common complaint that I have heard (and have nyself) is that there is
little indication of what Korman is doing in the background. In PyPRP,
the raw export log was dumped to the console, and many liked to watch it
travel by as an indicator of progress. As such, I have implemented a
rudimentary progress monitor that outputs to the console into the export
logger.
Unfortunately, there is no "easy" way to show progress in the Blender UI
currently. Korman makes the assumption that nothing will touch
Blender's context while it is executing. Attempts to mvoe the exporter
into a background thread have all resulted in spectacular failures. So,
this will have to do for now.
The export logger and export reporter have been merged together to form
an eventually much more powerful export analysis feature. For now, the
benefit is that general log messages don't have to be so fiddly with
print statements and string formatting. You're welcome.
So, the previous hypothesis was absolutely WRONG. The real issue was the
appending of .001s and such when you have a material on many objects. Each
object-material pair has its own light group now because object Plasma
modifiers can change the rules a bit.
w00t for fixage
Doobes has reported that _LIGHTMAPGEN groups can be intermittently left
attached to some lamps. This is similar to a UnicodeDecodeError we were
having before in which a cached Blender object pointer became trashed
somehow. I think in this case our cached copy of the light group is no
longer equal to what is found in bpy.data.groups, so the removal fails...
Or something along those lines.
So, we now find the group again from the list and erase that. As a final
sanity test, on blend file save, we nuke all _LIGHTMAPGEN groups.
Added the Render > Lighting modifier that lets one specify whether or not
we should forcibly use RT lights. This allows us to change the light
baking rules to allow the baking of nonanimated Plasma lights when this
setting is disabled. The modifier also has text explaining what the
lighting results should look like.
I fail to understand why Blender thinks this is legit, but oh well...
Also, as a bonus, we no longer clobber values in the GoodNeighbor tracker.
I wonder how many bugs this will fix?
It tried to bake some stupid stuff before, eg objects with no materials.
The bug was related to items being removed from a list during a loop. This
has been corrected by looping backwards by index.
