What does "Shooting Lights" in Advanced Lighting do?

[garyhasler]

(I posted this in Discreet Max forum but am getting desperate so posting here too...seem to be some real experts here; are you listening Alex?...)

What does "Shooting Lights" in Advanced Lighting do? Does it perform an initial mesh subdivision based on direct shadows? I've read and reread the Reference section on it but don't get it.

 

"...Light Settings group

Shoot Direct Lights—When adaptive subdivision or shoot direct lights is on, the direct lighting on all of the objects in the scene is calculated analytically, based on the following switches. Lighting is analytically computed without modifying the object's mesh which produces lighting that is less noisy and more pleasing to the eye....."

 

So does this mean that an object's faces don't get subdivided due to direct light? That's what the illustration in the reference looks like!

 

I'm trying to figure out how to get better mesh subdivision--currently it's a trade-off between having medium sized objects (like paintings hanging on the wall) not cast indirect shadows at all, and having the entire wall full of shadow artifacts.

[theqball]

The "shooting lights" is the adaptive subdivision calculation taking place. If you stop or cancel the radiosity after 1% you will see the results.

What the help doc is trying to say is the actual mesh is really not altered it creates a new radiosity mesh that's really just temporary. and yes the adaptive subdivision is based on the contrast values created from shooting the direct lights into the scene, and then of course is divided based on your meshing min/max settings.

Hope that helps…

[garyhasler]

Great! Thanks, Shane...that makes sense.

While I've got your attention, on a similar subject, I've found that after running a radiosity solution, the only way to control my rendering brightness that looks okay is to change the physical scale. The reference recommends using the Logarithmic exposure control but I find it looks really badly washed out and pastelly no matter what I set the values to.

 

So what I do is actually switch to Logarithmic, but then uncheck "Active" so it's not in effect, then adjust the Scale which still works. The reference repeatedly states that this value doesn't affect photometric lights, but in fact it seems to affect all the stored radiosity but NOT any standard fill lights which are excluded from radiosity processing!(??). Now if a room is too bright or dark because of receiving more skylight through windows, I can adjust the Scale and all is well. This seems rather backwards; is there a better way? (Also when doing animations this means I have to render two sequences, one with each Scale value, then blend them in Premiere when moving from room to room).

[theqball]

Physical scale does only work on non photometric lights, so you must have something in your scene that’s not photometric based.

Logarithmic, creates a bandpass type of filter on the data. Thus clamping the lows and highs more severly than the mid tones. This is close to what the human eye does, but it does tend to be more drastic at times (depends on the scene).

You could try using Automatic or Linear, they both are linear filters on the data. This will result in more CG/Digital look (thus not my favorite) with deaper blacks and brighter whites than logarithmic. These filters are closer to what a camera lens would do.

Personally I like logarithmic the most and will use automatic if feeling lazy and don’t want to tune log into my liking.

[garyhasler]

Unfortunately I'm doing animations so Logarithmic and None are my only options. I still insist that Physical scale DOES adjust the brightness of a finished radiosity solution, at least if "Active" is unchecked (try it--you'll see!) and I use photometric lights exclusively for my radiosity.