I created a video called Blender 2.49b Radiosity Tutorial at:
Radiosity is a difficult subject. My goal is to help people unfamiliar with radiosity to become comfortable with the concept and Blender’s implementation of it.
I welcome all comments.
Nice one.
I always found the Radiosity system to work good with simple objects
but when I imported a high res model from Rhino I got a lot of artifacts
which I never was able to smooth out.
Working with the Hemi Cube Res affected it a little but never solved it.
Did you explore the Hemi Res and Limits in detail? I never really understood
those too much.
Maybe I used the Radiosity solver in the wrong way.
too bad, Radiosity is going to disappear in 2.50
true
but when we might have GI inside blender we can bake the GI solution into a UV texture which probably
will be more detailed and we do not end up with a super dense mesh.
I assume the result will also be even better than the old radiosity solver.
Radiosity in Blender is one of the worst radiosity implementation I’ve ever seen on a rendering software.
If you scarcely know POV-Ray then you know what Radiosity truly is.
A while ago I tried to tranfer bake the radiosity to a lower poly mesh,
but if I remember right it didn’t work too well.
Povray is a lot of fun, I’ve only just started to use it, and, I have trouble with
setting the intensity for the radiosity lights, but I’m still just figuring it out.
I have the lights maxed out in the script as well as in the emit material,
and everything is still pretty dark. I love how fast it is though, to see the render,
like a waterline going down quickly, is nice.
well the Radiosity solver should not be used for object renderings
by today means. Flamingo and Electric Image used the same approach.
But it can be quite useful when you make a low poly architecture and want to shade it.
But as I stated with the option of the new GI system and texture baking it makes
the Radiosity system obsolete.
Then it’s a definate good thing it was yanked out of Blender for 2.5, photon mapping, even the WIP stuff Farsthary has done so far makes it obsolete anyway, any true GI should be more practical now since the raytracer has gotton a bunch of optimizations;)
I didn’t even know they were going to add GI to blender…
People have been asking for that for a while. They say the POV radiosity/GI is
real global illumination, but it looks almost the same to me as blender radiosity,
although the quality is a little better. POV has the same bounce artifacts along
edges of walls, like in the middle of a wall crease there’ll be bright spots.
I read the difference is that blender is per vertex, so I guess they’re saying it depends on the subdivision for real gi?
I was just wondering if that’s the only difference.
I always thought they rendered a lot of the first seasons of ‘star trek voyager’ with baked radiosity,
a lot of the earlier cg outdoor alien terrain/building scenes have that look, then they switched
fx houses for the last couple of seasons. I’m right in the middle of using POV ray, so I’m all about radiosity today,
and wandered into the first radiosity thread I saw! 
It’s hard to balance the self illuminating, (in povray) even with the same emitting values for everything,
some objects seem to go shadeless.
I love this vertexcoloring radiosity thing in Blender…
Is there any solution to bake radiosity to textures?
I don’t see why they are removing it.
I’ve been using radiosity for a while now and baking it to a texture, in fact, here’s something I’m working on right now.
These are just lighting tests for a game.
So hopefully there is something better in 2.5.
Here’s mine:
- Unwrap the original mesh before radiositing.
- Do the radiosity thing. Add new mesh.
- Hide or delete lamps.
- Bake new mesh “Full Render” to texture. ( there may be two materials on the new mesh, and you may need to delete one.)
- Apply texture to original mesh.
Edit:
Good tutorial irakrakow, I’m sure this will be helpful to some and I hope your time wasn’t wasted.
Do you mean in 2.49 or 2.5?
If you mean 2.49 if you press ‘full render’ in bake it’s automatic,
I just made a test and it works a lot better with a cage.
The mesh on layer one needs to be collected for radiosity calculation.
http://www.box.net/shared/atz47zar0o
I just see that phil b posted
Hey, I bet they’re going to be able to bake the GI soon, so that’ll be good.
The same question. there are any outer GI solution ( with Bake ) in BGE 2.5.
if not i think a wrong don´t enable Radiosity in 2.5.
endi
do you use it a lot? for low poly models it seems to work very well.
i never had good results with high res meshes.
since we have baking you can easily bake the radiosity solution into a uv texture.
I have some problems with Blender radiosity but I think it is good for simpe things, and for fast work.
But I think a real radiosity thing need in Blender…
I always bake the result to the original model, so with is, the end result is a low poly with a small texture.
And I bake an AO to, multiplied by the radiosity texture.
Examples (first and second has multiplied AO):
http://etyekfilm.hu/radio_example.jpg
Another bad thing: hard to control the parameters. Sometimes the result is very bad and I dont know why.
I see what you mean, makes sense.
well the point of the radiosity system is that it renders damn fast !
claas