Stack Exchange network consists of 183 Q&A communities including Stack Overflow, the largest, most trusted online community for developers to learn, share their knowledge, and build their careers.
@gandalf3 Using a curve modifier has the disadvantage that in general the railroad ties will not be square anymore after bending the object along a curve.
@SixthOfFour That's why I also said that he needs to allign the vertices along the mirror axis. Then the vertices will be merged. And since he seems to have the Armature modifier below the Mirror modifier (see different arm poses) they should not rip open again.
I think the easiest way is to bake the lighting into a texture and access the texture. Also old Blender builds (I think until 2.49b) had a feature called Radiosity Rendering which is a finite element approximation of global illumination. I am not sure if you can access the data from radiosity rendering but you might want not check it out.
