Fakeiosity

[Ken Walton]

Does anyone know of any in-depth tutorials (more than - 1. Do this; 2. Use this value; 3. Do this; 4. Get this) on learning "fakeiosity", or at least understanding the general approach. The method I'd be looking for would apply to interior residential scenes "lit" only with the natural light from plenty of large windows. I've achieved some great results w/finalRender's GI, but I have eleven sequences of animation to render, and I need to distribute it. So fR will have to wait I guess since - once again - time is the pressing (and depressing) factor here.

 

Thanks,

Ken Walton

[STRAT]

well, i can post a standard tut url up if you want. i used this to base my own fakiosity methods on. it's easy to understand and alter to your liking. i use it on all my internals in viz these days where normal radiosity takes too long.

[TAKA]

Strat, can u post that URL plz (hi to all btw)

[STRAT]

faking GI and sunlight - http://www.the3dstudio.com/tutorials.asp?id=97&mode=Display&name=Faking+Sun+Light&ct=Lighting&author=Daniel+Moy&email=moyboy%40moyboygraphics%2Ecom&url=www%2Emoyboygraphics%2Ecom

 

faking bounced light (radiosity) - http://www.the3dstudio.com/tutorials.asp?id=7&mode=Display&name=Radiosity+Simulation&ct=Lighting&author=Espen+Sande+Larsen&email=NA&url=www%2Edve%2Eno%2Fmaxcenter

[Ken Walton]

STRAT:

Thanks for the links - the Cornell example is basically the approach I've taken in the past, and is the most relevant to my current situation; however, my interiors are a little more complicated than an inverted cube. I'm sure the approach will be generally the same, but my problem is knowing when to "quit" placing lights. If all of my walls are a single material, and the floor and ceiling each have their own, can I still get away with four shadowless wall lights (say in N,W,S,E) to cast my wall color? I think I tried this before but I don't remember how successful it was. As for the "bounced" light off of other objects in the scene (such as large furniture and cabinets), would you be placing lights w/these objects or not? If so, are there advantages to the light types you use (omni vs. 179-falloff spot. AND - is this extra placement of lights time + render time that much lower than the GI solution? Bare with me for what seem like complete newbie questions here, I'm just trying to find out if I've been doing this stuff wrong from the beginning.

 

Thanks again,

Ken Walton

[plastic]

Originally posted by Ken Walton:

The method I'd be looking for would apply to interior residential scenes "lit" only with the natural light from plenty of large windows. I've achieved some great results w/finalRender's GI, but I have eleven sequences of animation to render, and I need to distribute it.

the classical faked-skylight approaches don't work with interiours. what you need is lightscape/VIZ4/max5 radiosity.

simulating daylight-through-windows without using radiosity is one of the hardest things in scene-lighting-setup i can imagine.

of course you can use a bright shadow casting omni for the sun, and lots of fake lights in the room, but it

 

a) won't look good, unless

b) you spend hours with placing lights, which will result in

c) huge rendertimes

d) and requires a lot of experience

[Ken Walton]

Marc: that's what I was afraid of.

 

Next question - does anyone know of a way to avoid the two-day waiting period to buy a handgun?

 

Just kidding.

Ken Walton

[kid]

creating fakosity interiors isn't always that bleak

 

 

 

4 lights outside and 6 inside, if you look at the floor you'll see the shadows sweeping across the floor which gives it away. I've found with fake lighting you spend much more time setting up the lighting but save much time on render times (depending on renderer and shadow type used)

 

rendered in C4D BTW, but the technique's the same

 

[ September 04, 2002, 02:40 PM: Message edited by: kid ]

[Lanni]

Kid your fakeiosity looks good, think you could throw together a small tut on your process of making it?

[STRAT]

Originally posted by Marc Lorenz:

quote:

---

Originally posted by Ken Walton:

The method I'd be looking for would apply to interior residential scenes "lit" only with the natural light from plenty of large windows. I've achieved some great results w/finalRender's GI, but I have eleven sequences of animation to render, and I need to distribute it.

the classical faked-skylight approaches don't work with interiours. what you need is lightscape/VIZ4/max5 radiosity.

simulating daylight-through-windows without using radiosity is one of the hardest things in scene-lighting-setup i can imagine.

of course you can use a bright shadow casting omni for the sun, and lots of fake lights in the room, but it

 

a) won't look good, unless

b) you spend hours with placing lights, which will result in

c) huge rendertimes

d) and requires a lot of experiencei agree and dissagree. imho the classic faked skylite option does work for complicated interiors with little or no windows most effectively, it just needs some tweeking. but once set up it's there for you to use.

 

i've been doing it for a couple of years now because proper gi has been unnavailable to me until recently.

 

but you are right too, it is hard to set up and does take a long time to tweek and you do need experience doing it, but when set up and tested it DOES render faster than full propper gi if done correctly.

 

my advice? personally i'd perseveer with it, it will work once you have it sussed

[plastic]

>>but when set up and tested it DOES render faster than full propper gi if done correctly.

 

GI is always slow, but radiosity is not, especially with flythroughs. once the radiosity is calculated there is almost no speed hit. since you need much fewer lights it renders faster.

 

kid, that looks good. i'd be interested in the lights setup. it has a bit of the faked-gi plastic look, but impressing, all in one.

still, calculated radiosity would look better and render faster, per frame...

[mbr]

Final Render should be able to network render, as far as I know. Take a look at the forum, there's a good animation on there.

http://www.finalrender.com/forums/fR_main/YaBB.pl

fR GI works similarly to Radiosity in that it creates a solution and saves it. Therefore the first frame will take many hours, but after that it should cruise right along. I haven't done it yet, but hopefully very soon.

GI takes a long time to render but you don't need to tweak 10-20 lights, just one or two, so in the end the set up time is about the same (from my experience with fR).

fR is still much faster than Max 5's radiosity, according to the review that was on the main page last week. Personally, I think it's a great program.

[STRAT]

Originally posted by Marc Lorenz:

[QB]>>but when set up and tested it DOES render faster than full propper gi if done correctly.

 

GI is always slow, but radiosity is not, especially with flythroughs. once the radiosity is calculated there is almost no speed hit. since you need much fewer lights it renders faster.QB]

this is only true if the fly by or animation you're doing has a very constant lighting scheme. even then, to avoid flickering and to get a real result each frame should ultimately be rendered with it's own radiosity solution.

[plastic]

this is only true if the fly by or animation you're doing has a very constant lighting scheme. even then, to avoid flickering and to get a real result each frame should ultimately be rendered with it's own radiosity solution.

yeah, nothing is allowed to move, which is usually no problem in case of an architectual flythough/camera pan.

max5 has a great tool, texture baking. it allows assigning the radiosity solution to vertex colors/maps. you can add some interactivity then. a bit like with computer games. the environment is GI-prerendered and the characters and other moving parts have their own (traditional) lighting.

finalrender has texture baking but i found that hardly useable. it takes ages, AGES to calculate, and the result is often ugly (artefacts everywhere).

max5's approach is far more useable.

IMO there is no way around texture baking, i have yet to see a real 100% GI animation at full tv resolution. i don't think anyone can afford one hour of rendering per frame (since most GI-accelerators, like photon-mapping also don't like to work with [real] animations)

[kid]

...i have yet to see a real 100% GI animation at full tv resolution...

I think Final Fantasy was rendered with GI using Kilauea render engine at an average of 90 minutes per frame - don't know how big their network is tho

[kainoa]

I think Final Fantasy was rendered with GI using Kilauea render engine at an average of 90 minutes per frame - don't know how big their network is tho

The final lighting images in Final Fantasy were rendered with a modified Renderman setup. The Kilauea engine was completed towards the end of FF's production and was marketed to other studios as another source of income for the studio here in Hawaii.

 

As far as the 90min/frame...not even close. Actually it's impossible to tell exactly how long it took to render 1 frame. Rendering took place at all stages of production. However, final 3d images were always rendered byLayer (each shot having anywhere from 5-50 layers) and then later composited together. Rendering layers went relatively quick. Renders were divided up between as many as 10 cpus depending on availability and when the shot had to be completed. After the layers were rendered they were composited together and then rendered again on as many as 4 cpus. A 400 frame comp render took about 2 hrs.

[kid]

As far as the 90min/frame...not even close

 

I read that from a site that wrote a review of the Kilauea render engine. I'll try to find the URL and you can set them straight.

[abicalho]

90 min per frame... in how many computers of which speed?

 

From what I remember, Kilauea and Renderman use distributed rendering, so timing the frames on that environment is pretty useless for real world production scenarios, since it may take 90 minutes using 40 computers at the same time...

 

Alexander