I dont understand radiosity at all, will someone explain?

Support Materials and Textures
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I’ve looked at tutorials and i still cant get it to work properly. can anybody explain?

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I will explain how to make it work the simplest way without getting into all the how’s and why’s. All the tutorials are knee deep in that stuff.
There are 2 ways to use it. Before render and during render. First I will explain the before render method.

  1. Create your scene. (MUST have a camera)
  2. Select an object (any object) that you want to use as your light source. Double check the normals of the light source object. Light will be emited in the direction of its normals. Set it’s emit value (under the shaders tab in the material buttons ) to about .3
  3. Now select all the objects in your scene, except for the camera.
  4. In the radiosity buttons, in the radio tool tab, click collect meshes. This will include all the objects you had selected into the radiosity calculations.
  5. Next click the Gour button under the radio tool tab.
  6. Now click Go. You should see elements highlighting all over the place on your surfaces. If you dont see this, go back(by clicking Free Radio Data) and double check all of these steps. Also double check your normals. Also make sure you have a camera.
  7. When it is finished, click the Replace Meshes button. It has totally destroyed all your groupings and nice pretty meshes and attatched them all together as one big object.

From here you could seperate your parts again, add textures, lights, ect. Then render your scene normally. This is also a good way to add artificial lighting to objects to use in the game engine or in creating textures.

To use it the other way, during render, just click the radiosity button in the render panel. All the settings for radiosity rendering are located in the radio render panel. Not many controls but enough to keep you busy. Maybe someone else will post and describe each of thier exact functions, because I sure don’t know them.
I am still having trouble with some slight deformations in more rounded, organic surfaces.

Well I hope this might help you at least get started using radiosity. It is the simplest explination. After you get it at least to do somthing, maybe then some of the things in those long, drawn out tutorials will make some sense :slight_smile:

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thank you alot, i actually got it to work lol. now i’m gonna play around with it alot lol