Prelighting Max 7

[Bigley]

Has anyone heard of prelighting?
I think it is like it calculates all of the shadows and saves it in your viewport therefore it doesn't have to reconfigure each frame you render

[shikav4]

Are you talking about radiosity. In radiosity you can see the shadows in the view port. It dosent have to recalculate the shadow until the objects are moving.

[jaro]

In addition to (or instead of) using radiosity you can also use render to texture, which renders everything you want (including light and shadows) to a bitmap. Then you can use this bitmap with 100% self-illuminated material to get a superfast rendering with the lighting "baked" in the texture.

[Bigley]

Hey man the render to texture was exactly what I was looking for but I can't bake a sky light it wont let me. Do u know how?

[jaro]

Well there shouldn't be any problem baking a skylight with render to texture. You need to bake a complete map and to see the light of the skylight you'll need to use light tracer, radiosity or mental ray final gather.