how-to do gi?

Support Basics & Interface
1

hi… I heard there’s a way to do it in yafray - is there also a way to do iot with blender’s internal renderer? Got some problem with yafray texture export (no, not the common one ;))

I also thought about doing some nice gi look with radiosity… but its too much work to separate 500 objects of the scene again after the progress, isnt it?

regards,
Chris

2

radiosity doesn’t have to be precalculated anymore
(but it still doesn’t consider the changes in ref, color, or emit value of your material if a texture changes it).

there is a radio button in the display buttons to turn that on

also of note is that you must subdivide your mesh
(where subsurf buttons are you can choose a simple subdivide)

I think the workflow would work similar, to a point

set up things so that the radiosity calc produces good results, but don’t save any of your calculations.
(probably want to set a value for max iterations because it will be calcuated each time you render)

you control which materials are in the radiosity calculation by controling which materials have the radio button pressed in their materials (in the material buttons)

ALSO
in 2.33 there will be ambient occlusion settings in the world buttons
(dowload a recent build from the testing thread on blender.org to play with it)
you need to have ray on in the display buttons for it to work, but it creates a nice effect

but, there aren’t much in the way of tutorials on ambient occlusion in blender, esecially on tweaking the values for different situations, at the moment

3

so what you meant about the radiosity progress is : :smiley:

  1. reducing all objects to mesh objects, inserting self-illumination light-sources

  2. going into the radiosity buttons, enter all the settings, and starting a calculation till the point I want it.

  3. turning on radiosity in rendering buttons, and lets start rendering?

anything else to turn on? vertex colors etc?

Regards,
Chris

4
  1. reducing? if it isn’t a mesh object it will be treated as one if doing the calc at render time (so you can do radiosity with nurbs and stuff, but not precalcuated [iirc])

so, it is up to you. the settings don’t correspond exactly in some situations

otherwise, I think you have the idea. use the static calc to get the settings right for the most part, and turn on radio where needed (display buttons and materials)

5

hmm…strange.
The only thing I got is a black rendering screen in progress… =/

here’s a discription of what I did:

I applied some materials to the scene, no special settings, just the radio button turned on.

I made the radiosity progress, but didn’t do sth like “add new meshes” ,

After that, I turned radio on in the rendering buttons, and shadows and envmap off. Nothing else… I started rendering and - he showed me just some black screen, and a sign for rendering in progress, since about 20 mins, just for a scene with a cube, a spline and a radiosity emitter.

Regards,
Chris

6

the radiosity progress is shown in the console window
(which is not visible by default except on windows?)

I suggested doing test runs with the interactive solver because you can make them take a limited amount of time, the default convergence value is low enough that it will take REALLY long with a simple scene.