Do i need GI & Caustics?

[meatlockerii]

Hi,

i want to do a scene where it starts off in darkness then a door opens which lets light flood in.

I was wondering in order to do this do i need to use global illumination and caustics? Bare in mind that the scene doesn't necessarily need to look real, i just want that light spill effect.

[richard-sher]

You don't need either, you could to all of it using Final Gathering. But GI would help. Caustics would not help, unless you had glass or water that you wanted to use to refract the light.

Have a look at this page: http://www.edharriss.com/tutorials/tutorials_render_XSI.htmlhttp://www.edharriss.com/tutorials/tutorials\_render\_XSI.html
It's got lots of FG/GI tutorials on it.

[pnoizat2]

Has anyone tried the above or similar, with say 4 single frame renders of secondary light that use both fg and/or gi, spaced out say at 15 seconds, 30 s, 45 s, and 60 s. these could be blended into each other and composited with a straight render (no fg, gi) of every frame to generate the directlight....

(i get frustrated watching a scene gi/fg every frame when they arent actually different enough to warrant it.)

[fuzy]

Hmmm.... what about linking the bounce/bleedlights of the room to the rotation of the door? You would probably need to tweek the intensity/color of the boucelights a bit, but that would be quite easy to do in the fcurves of the "link with" expression. Sigh, using lightscape this would be quite easy to do. And with proper radiosity too .

[pnoizat2]

ive never enjoyed using lightscape.....
i didnt like the way it integrated with max, and oh so slow..... I also felt, models had to be crafted with lightscape in mind to deliver the best results..
the mental ray is far more appealing to me.

[fuzy]

I used lightscape for doing realtime architectual visualisations - so most of the stuff was rather low poly anyway, and it was just a matter of planning the model ot make it work. A proper modelled scene rendered IMO quite fast compared to what I've seen of GI/FG so far. But then again - I'm a bit more of a NPR type of person now >).

Ivanp.

[pnoizat2]

so you were rendering out shadow maps?
mmmm i never got into that, looked interesting though.
what was the workflow like for reapplying them?
what were you doing your realtime stuff in?
Im working for the auckland uiniverstity architecture department. its good to see some fellow arrchitects around these parts .

and agreed i guess we have had a serious hardware update between using the two products, so perhaps the speed is comparable.

have you done anything with radiance?

excellent
Te Anau