Well done Seaowl!
Your first GR2 import looks promising, and your GR2/DAT comparison is very useful. Besides the obvious eye candy of dynamic shadows, It also demonstrates that GR2 model look much sharper too, though the additional texture maps you have added to the GR2 version of Flakmonkey's model, the in-memory texture compression/sampling settings (for the DAT version) might also play a role in that. I have a few questions/remarks.
Have you tried adding a specular map in the alpha channel of the main (diffuse) texture? A well done specular map can do miracles in increasing the realism of models.
Are the lighthouses set as terrain objects or as land units?
If the latter is true, you can add a LOD model for the GR2 version. Just look at stock sea/air units to see how their LOD models are set.
If the contrary is true (i.e. the lighthouses are simple terrain objects) no LOD model is possible, but I am curious to know if you applied
this method to increase the rendering radius of the GR2 model.
Are the texture/materials of the DAT lighthouse version set as in SHIII or SHIV? SHIII has a limited multi-material support, but SHIV's UnifiedRenderController enables DAT models to have as many maps and textures as SH5's GR2 models and to similarly use dds (compressed) textures instead of tga ones. It would be interesting if we could put side by side a DAT and GR2 model at their respective best, and see how they will compare in game.
I can be wrong, but I seem to see a smoothing problem near the base of the model (below the door). If that's true you can solve it by splitting some of the model edges. Since you are using Blender, there is a
edge split modifier you can use for quickly performing that task.
Storing the lamp/lens model and the flare effect in separate files than the main model is a good idea. If the main model is set as a unit, you can link the lamp to it by equipment node/bone and date-configurable .eqp file or, for any other type of model, via placement nodes (for DAT units) or via bones and
.prt file (for GR2 units).
Creating new bones using GR2 Editor is not hard: you need to check and select one of the existing bones, right click on it and select "clone bone". Renaming the new bone, changing its parent bone and editing its position within the model is quite straightforward but let me know if you need help. Just note that the latest GR2 Editor version don't handle bones very well, so make backups (in case you file gets corrupted) and in case you fail performing the clone upload here you file and I will see which one of the previous GR2E versions I have on my HD will work better with it
