My two cents if no one minds:
If you're using instanced geometry for you objects, consider at the VERY least baking down some ambient occlusion.
Since you're using Max:
- Go to the Lights rollout and add a Sky Light
Consider adding a ground plane under the object to occlude the light from the bottom
- In the Advanced Lighting rollout(under Rendering), turn on either Radiosity or Lighttracer. Use low values to do quick tests; low percentile on the rad solution or low Rays/Samples below 150 for lighttracer...you can get away with no bounces for increased speed since you're going for occlusion, not light bounce. Turn up the samples and such when you're ready for a final pass with Render to Texture.
If your object is UV'd properly to a page, you can for the most part get away with baking the ambient solution down
onto the texture you're using now for objects, just make sure you back up your old ones! In this case, you can simply save over the old ones in your
/<data> folder and Torque will reload all the new textures with the ambient lighting and immediately see the results in engine. All in all this shouldn't take more than a week to process all your objects (assuming you have quite a bit), perhaps even less.
Now, if you're NOT instancing objects and they're not dynamic, consider treating your scenes as one object and go for a more robust lighting solution using the above outline, but turn light bouncing, add extra lights (sun, lamp) and increase your samples on the final pass to get full on global illumination. Here you can get lighting interaction across and between objects and make the scenes feel richer with a tiny bit of extra effort.
Here are a couple of old examples which a few of you might remember:
Here I have every object in this scene sharing one huge UV page on a separate channel, and then laying down two large lightmaps over them I get a more intimate feel, and its not time intensive and rather fun IMHO. (FYI, ignore the the banding in in the lightmap nearest the window...I was using DXT1 which compresses the hell out of textures; thats not indicative of any problem with lightmaps themselves, just user error.
Anyway, if Torque supports multitexturing, you can have lightmap texture pages separate from your object textures instead of baking the lighting solution down, allowing you to use less texture space with your diffuse textures layered with the lightmap on top.
This was just some quick blathering but everyone should consider this; when a little bit of effort can pay off big in dividends, you dont ignore that. Its not selling out, its polishing a product and there's no reason not to. If it ends up being a LOT of work, then perhaps dont bother, but dont immediately assume you're catering to the masses because you want to make it prettier, thats silly. If you have available artist time, use it and remember this is your baby VD, and you want to present it in the best availabe
light. Personally I dont care either way, as I still plan to play it, but you do have options and you can at the very least look into it.
Cheers
EDIT: ...and just to make it clear, I'm not talking about using dynamic lights in-engine, but rather baking out lighting FROM Max...big difference. Personally I'm not a fan of per vertex dynamic lighting, so unless you want to implement per-pixel, stick with tried and true lightmaps. :D