Lighting Question - Faking Radiosity

Support Basics & Interface
1

Hi,

Please have a look at this tutorial: http://www.cgarchitect.com/resources/tutorials/smoke3d/tutorial3.asp

I have tried to achieve similar results, but don’t know how to approximate what they refer to as an ‘ambient light’ in Blender.

Does anyone have any real experience of faking radiosity with cleverly placed lights, and if so, could they give me some hints as to how to proceed, or possibly even try to achieve the same results as the tutorial and post the resulting .blend :wink:

All the best,

Andy

2

Why? Radiocity is availble in Blender.

3

Because:
Blenders’ inbuilt radiosity messes up the mesh, and I don’t lke it, and the ‘fake lights’ method can be animated ie lights can move, change strength etc
Using YAFRAY radiosity/GI is very slow and prone to artifacts, especially during animations
It is much more flexible to fake radiosity/GI, or at least know how to fake it
Using lights to fake it, you can render out a seperate pass for certain lights and composite the results for even more control over the finished render

There are probably more reasons.

Andy

4

Abient Occlusion?

5

Yes, I know about the different ways of letting the renderer try to ‘fill in the shadows’, but I want to fake it, by hand, or at least know how to.

Besides, ambient occlusion doesn’t even fake bounced light, just light from a ‘sky dome’.

Is my question not clear enough?

Regards,

Andy

6

You can try to put Area lights near the walls and adjust their color to the wall color. This wont fake it perfecly but in some cases it might be enough.