can’t find the “importance sampling” thing,is it the setting that comes with “sample as lamp”? what does map resolution relate too?
and i was just wanted an “artist friendly” idea of what bias was,and I think you cleared it up pretty well.
so biased is something like luxrender? I didn’t know any of those differences,and I didn’t know why lux would take 10 years to render one image,and cycles did not.I think its clearer now,thanks.
yes, indeed this setting is labled as “sample as lamp”, the map resolution calculates a x by x image which us then used to determine which areas are more important to sample (because they are bright and contribute more to the final image).
To my knowledge both Cycles and Luxrender are mostly unbiased. Some people prefer not to call Cycles unbiased, because of the options to limit light bounces and such, but in essence the sampling is unbiased. Luxrender is just a totaly different renderengine, it does spectral calculations, Cycles just does all in RGB, that’s one of the reasons it may be slower, but it’s also much more “physicly correct”, Cycles on the other hand is “physicly based”, with lots of ways to cheat your way around. Luxrender also has some more advanced algorithms where Cycles “only” does simple pathtracing, it realy depends on the Scene your trying to render, if it’s an animation or a still, how much indirect lighting there is, if you need spectral sampling for totaly correct dispersion effects and stuff like that.
Cycles is mostly written to be a fast animation friendly renderengine with lots of possibilities to tweak settings for professional needs.
Luxrender is a spectral render that wants to be as physicly accurate as possible, which makes it slow and so is mostly used for Stills only.
All those terms are pretty insignificant as long as you get the results you need out of your renderengine though…
thanks,great explanation.Yeh at this point in time,I’m so inexperienced with that part of production that I don’t know what is significant and what isn’t.Its still of interest to me though.Thats good help,eventually I’ll compile some information in an organized manor (perhaps a PDF) so people don’t have to read through all the thread.
i’ll get back to questions about nodes and there uses when I get a bit more time…