What flasche said. An unlit render is just the Base Color / Diffuse Color without any diffuse lighting and specular reflections.
Just to link you some sources: Here is a more detailed article on the phong shader in Source. It also shows the parameter for the Ambient Occlusion map I talked about earlier. (It's the last one under the "Brightness" section.)
I've tried to render only the diffuse in 3Ds Max but for some reason it's not appearing properly when I render it: The strange thing is that it looked fine when I used the Xolilul shader, I have tried to reset xform, reset the whole scene, exporting the whole thing and importing it again, but nothing seems to work. It looks like it's applying the AO, but nothing else on the cannon. Any ideas?
Just turn the self-illumination for your material to 100%. More tips here: http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=56280
Well there are still some shadows here and there, but it works for now. You might want to give it a try and just simply render it without using the Xoliul-Viewport-Shader. From what I can see here, this is an acceptable amount of AO applied. This is for the most part actually how the model would look like when lighted by a dynamic light. There are no huge static shadows, so that's good. What you can do, is use your AO as a filter and use some brushes (if you just paint your textures) to paint dirt in the crevices. Apart from that, I have two aesthetical and two technical problems with this. The aesthetical first: - The turret lacks any kind of view port for the gunner. - The openings in the hull view ports should either be completely black or made reflective as to imitate glass. Now the technical: - Those vents on the side of the hull are way too much detail for such a small thing compared to the rest of the tank. Those are ideal candidates for the normal map. - More of a question: Are you by any chance using Smoothing Groups on the low poly model? If you do, please remove them and rebake the normal map. You will get a lot better results with that.
It looks very nice, although the colours are a bit too light. I take it source makes it look that way. Click on the hyperlinked image for the bigger one.
Yes, that's temporary. The idea is that the barrel will have a different model depending on what you have equipped (HE, ranged, standard etc) but that isn't implemented yet. There is currently no specular map and the other textures need work aswell, so nothing you see here is final.
Yeah it might be better looking with specular and glossiness. Also emp_money probably isn't the best map to present models lighting wise.