I am writing an engine and what I want to do is precalculate the lighting for the models so I can include shadowing information and radiosity in the model. I understand I can do this by placing the precalculated brightness value into the COLOR variable for each vertex and using no hardware lighting. However, I want to integrate this information with hardware lighting so I can have some of the light precalculated, but allow for the preformance gain of calculating moving lights in hardware. Is there any way to do this in OpenGL, or am I forced to calculate all the lighting in software and place it into the color value?
If you want to light a color per vertex you have to use GL_COLOR_MATERIAL.\Let the color be fed into the diffuse channel of the material. That changes the material properties used in the lighting calcaulations with the color at the vertex.
Well, be prepared for some performance impact.