Once your scene has been imported into Max you can proceed to place all the lights and reassign all the materials and shaders. Don't spend much time tweaking the parameters. You will do a more precise job inside Lightscape, or, later on, in Maya.
Go under Export. Use the right unit scale and remember to mark your windows in the windows Tab.



Export your scene.

Open Lightscape and import the .lp file that Max created. Tweak the materials and lights using physical properties within Lightscape. Setup your rendering parameters and start the simulation. Now you can go to sleep, take a day off, or do everything that takes more than 12 hours of your time. My room has 141235 polygons initially. They became 1795928 after tessellation. The radiosity solution took about 12 hours to reach 90% of light distribution and used 432 MB of Ram. I used a Pentium III 700 MHz with 512 MB of Ram. Remember that Lightscape is not multithreaded, so only one processor will be used to compute the solution. If your scene has both interior and exterior elements the Lightscape manual suggests splitting it. Lightscape uses different algorithms for these different situations and they don�t work well with the wrong type of scene.

Back to Maya

If you intend to import the radiosity solution inside Maya be prepared for a tedious process. I found it easier to have Lightscape relight the textures I originally assigned to the model. Back in Maya, I swapped the unlighted textures with the lighted ones. An alternate method would be to write a script to swap the textures and set the shaders to be �self illuminating�.

Select all your surfaces in Lightscape and go under
Tools_> Mesh to Texture

Choose Relight existing textures.




If you have access to a PC the process will be a little bit easier.
Import the scene back into MAX.



From MAX export the file back to 3DS format. In Maya, load the free Plug-in 3dsmax import and import the file back insto Maya.
Another option is to access your Lightscape file using Polytrans as a Maya Plug-in. If it's not correctly creating Lightscape files directly, it should let you export the shaders, Lights, and Camera to MAX.

Notes

The process of moving the data through multiple applications is not perfect. Moreover, because of its scientific and technical background Lightscape is not well suited for organic or extremely complex shapes. Support for textures and shaders is poor. Importing radiosity illuminated textures back into a 3D application usually results in unrealistic or unappealing images. The best results are achieved on smooth flat surfaces. Worst case scenario? A cave�Don� t even think about it!