Image-based lighting

[Ace_Face]

What's the best way to achieve the right effect for an exterior view of a 3 story building. I have some interior lights and a few exterior lights, but I also want the sky to illuminate the building. I've followed the instructions in the Advanced Render manual for R8 with a dark scene as the result.

 

 

Any suggestions? :???:

[STRAT]

ok, for basic image based lighting, this is what i do -

 

create a sky object or a sphere (which must be scaled up to encompass the building) and give it a slight sky blue colour material (using the lum channel is best)

 

make sure your external lights you mentioned are locolised (ie, they illuminate only parts of the model and not all of it).

 

this will then give you basic image based lighting as shown -

 

 

 

to make the sky object invisible, add a composite tag to it, as shown in this render -

 

 

 

this final render shows exactly the same process, but using a large sphere instead of a sky object for my IBL. i've also included the GI settings.

This took about 10 secs to render (faster than a sky object btw) -

 

 

 

this is the basic settup. you'll need to meddle with the composite tag settings to get the combinations ur after. also, in r8.1, you can add HDR images to the illum channel to give HDRI image based rendering.

 

hope this helps

[Ace_Face]

Thanks Strat,

 

I think that solved my problem. I'm rendering a scene now and I'll let you know how it turns out.

[STRAT]

kewlies. any probs then shout, thats why we're here looking foreward to seeing ur results.

[Chris H]

Nice tip Strat.

How did you manage to get your cube and sphere to cast a shadow onto the plane without a light source?

[STRAT]

i didnt. it's just residual gi lighting.

[Chris H]

I had that damn auto light on, which is why I was getting different results from your posted pics.

Can't wait to use this!

[Ace_Face]

Ok, I tried an HDRI test with the St. Peters probe and it worked. The problem I'm having with my other image is that it keeps crashing Net Render. Does Net Render not support HDRI?

 

I'll have to run a render on my computer over night for a result.

[Frosty]

Net render does support HDRI. Are your clients and server updated to 8.1?

[Ace_Face]

Originally posted by Frosty:

Net render does support HDRI. Are your clients and server updated to 8.1?

You're right Frosty,

 

I had installed Client on a few machines by making a disk image and copying the folders. It seems the Updater is revising some of the system files as well. After I ran the updater Net Render is chugging along with my GI scene.

 

Still waiting for the results. I'll need to play with this to get a handle on the best "time to quality ratio" worked out. I had to up the intensity to brighten the scene. We'll see how it looks.

[STRAT]

Originally posted by Chris H:

I had that damn auto light on, which is why I was getting different results from your posted pics.

Can't wait to use this!

strange. the autolight would be automatically dissabled being as there were other lights in the scene already. (assuming of course they we active or switched on)

[Chris H]

Strat:

I didn't have any other lights at the time when trying to reproduce your scene.

 

I just checked and when you do add lights, the auto light doesn't turn off.