Final Update - Medieval Village/Avela

Everything is now complete, with everything being final rendered  and light mapped. Which took many hours! Everything had be light mapped several times before I could obtain the optimised results. 

First - light mapping took 9 and a half hours, where a blue screen appeared resulting in a failed attempt.

Second try - Started light mapping at 9:30pm, checked it in the morning at 9am and it had completed however nothing had changed!

Third try - Set everything the light mapping quality to low but kept the same settings and took 4 hours but the game proved too laggy to really play through nicely.

Forth try - took only 12 minutes once all settings were lowered to their minimum where the game could play much better but didn't look very good at all compared to before

Fifth try, settings improved, contrast between shadows increased to make up for the reduction in Ambient Occlusion as this proved too much for the game making it lag a lot. Brightness for the skylight was slightly increased to show the difference between the light and shadows much clearer. Turned out well, but due to the low quality settings, it still didn't look good enough at all. All shadows were very jaggy, hard and unrealistic. This render took 20 minutes.

Final render - Settings were kept the same, but this render took a lot longer simply because it was rendered at high quality. Took an overall time of 2 hours - nothing compared to the first try! I think I set the settings way too high which is why the blue screen occurred the first time - it was simply too much for the computer to handle. (and its a very high spec PC.) The settings I set where based on what other people had used in many different tutorials I had been looking at.

The final version can be seen below, some with low quality, to compare against the high quality.

Low Quality - High Settings: Gives deep shadows but less difference between light and shadow.

High Quality - Mid Settings: More contrast, less shadow but smoother and blended.

Another example of the changes in lighting.

Again, the light is much more visible from the sun, giving a more realistic feel to the scene.

This is where you can begin to see a big difference between low and high quality settings

As you can see, the quality is much better, with blended shadows, and they aren't jagged.

One last example - showing more light, quality and contrast.

And the huge decrease in Ambient Occlusion - doesn't look quite as good, but plays 10x better.

Remaining screen shots for the rest of the scene:

Everything turned out really well with my scene, and I'm really happy with the results considering that I knew very little on lighting at the beginning of this project. I did encounter one slight problem when it came to lighting however, and no matter what I tried, I could not resolve the problem and don't really understand why it appeared incorrectly.

Low Quality - High Settings: The shadows on the fruit look all right here.

High Quality - Mid Settings: But here, strange things start to happen with the high quality settings.

 

Due to the long light mapping times, trying to fix this can take a very long time, especially when not knowing what the actual problem is. This problem I know is not affected by the textured map from 3ds Max as it has a simple Spherical mesh.