explain refine iterations

[nevisstudio]

help. i am new to radiosity in 3ds max 5. could anyone give me a good explanation of refine iterations. what it means for selecting all or selecting some and incresing the # value. i seem to be wasting a lot of time.

thanks!!!

[xgarcia]

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Refine Iterations (All Objects)—Sets the number of Refine iterations to perform for the scene as a whole. The Refine Iterations stage increases the quality of the radiosity processing on all objects in the scene. Gathers energy from each face in order to reduce the variance between faces using a different process from the Initial Quality stage. This stage does not increase the brightness of the scene, but it improves the visual quality of the solution and significantly reduces variance between surfaces. If you don’t reach an acceptable result after processing a certain number of Refine iterations, you can increase the number and continue processing.

 

Tip: If you plan to use Regathering at render time, you generally don’t need to perform the Refine stage to get good-quality final renderings.

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Straight out of the MAX user reference. It's really quite thorough....

[nevisstudio]

thanks for the insight....the 'book' does not explain real clearly...anything else would b great....

[Fran]

Hi Rich,

 

It's a little hard to find, but refine iterations are explained in the User Guide. Look in the online help index for "radiosity" and then the topic for controls. It basically "gathers energy from each face in order to reduce the variance between faces using a different process from the Initial Quality stage". Usually it is curvalinear surfaces that need more refining and flat ones need less.

 

You could set the value for All Objects to something like 5, and set them individually via Object Properties for objects that need more refinement. Alternatively, you could look at the scene when processing is complete, select the objects that need further refinement, and set Refine Iterations (Selected Objects) to do more iterations.

 

Hope this helps.

[Jim Mann]

refine iterations = better quality radiosity

 

Thats pretty generalised but about sums it up. If you have something with small faces/triangles then increase the number of "refine iterations" for a better result.

 

Try it out and then have another look at the user guide, it should start making a bit more sense then.