I just did a test using blender 2.49′s radiosity feature. I wanted to bake self illumination to vertex color.

However, this opens more questions than it solves.

Radiosity in 2.49 doesn’t support double sided faces. This seems to cause artifacts when baking clothes and hair (clothes don’t have thickness, and I doubt I would go this far – the model is heavy enough as it is).

Additionally, the rendering is not very clean with the original, mid poly model (~5k faces). I can increase the definition to render lighting (using radio buttons), but then I need to transfer the result back to the original model.

So the plan (assuming I persist) would be to modify the model, add thickness to clothes, bake illumination, then write a script that can transfer color data back to the original model.

I think it’s a bit over the top but radio bakes play an important part in our pipeline already, and I feel vertex paint, however old fashioned, offers distinctive possibilities. For example I already have a script that can extract dark areas from the radio bake, which gives access to ‘shadow geometry’ – so we can take this into account when programming gameplay.

I’m also working on a method to simplify geometry while losing as little color information as possible – ultimately this should help me improve rendering quality without losing much performance.