Candela is a pipeline aid - it is a set of Melscripts meant to help guide the artist through multiple stages of environmental construction - from geometry and shader preparation, through assembly and placement of referenced geometry, to scene lighting, and finally, baking and file export- while reducing the complexity of the task and giving the artist a single, simple UI to use.
Candela is designed to streamline the process of baking environmental lightmaps in Maya for a video game engine, such as Unreal, Source, or Unity. It allows the artist to light multiple instances of a single piece of repeating geometry (such as a pillar, or section of corridor, etc.), and then give each piece a separate lightmap, automatically, with a single render. This lightmap is then immediately visible in Maya’s geometry display for preview. Once the light baking is to the artists liking, the scene is then exported as a simple text file, which can be interpreted by the game engine of your choice. (note: no Candela interpreter is included in this package. The candela file is made deliberately simple to allow a technical artist to script one for your studio’s game engine easily.)
The result is a savings of disk space, RAM and texture memory for your game scene, as referenced geometry can be used more flexibly, and in more situations.
Click on the following pages to learn more about how to use Candela.