Wanted to see what was all the fuss about the new radiosity in 2.28c. Here’s the result :
http://www.geocities.com/ottonet2000/LNY.html
render time: ~10 minute per picture… and I have a slow computer.
PS: I know the first pic envmaps don’t look so good… I forgot to set the world on real in this one :-? .
wow, thats impressive, but i think your lamp could use some more samples, its got a few jaggies on the shadows…
Samples?
Radiosity in blender doesn’t use lamps. 
oh.
sorry, im a bit of a retard, never even looked at radiosity before…
Wow, someone who is able to do a reflective material and realistic lighting WITHOUT a raytracer. CONGRATULATIONS! SERIOUSLY! You are among the exceptions 
Now if only we could apply this knowledge to something besides pretty colored spheres… ;))
It really does make a nice test though. Perhaps this will stimulate people to knock it off with this yafray business 
Dont put Yafray down it creates much more realistic images than blender is capable of at the moment. Maybe in the future then blender will become more and more photorealistic, but in my opinion Environment Maps are the hardest things ever to get right, i have never managed to acheive a good result with them.
Just because you are unable to use a program right doesn’t mean that it isn’t capable of doing things
Blender is exceptional. Blender users are exceptional. Who wants to wait for a good render?
So their right. Knowledge is power.
BTW @ner, your renders are sweet. Any chance that you will make a little tutorial or run us through the steps on how you did this? I have never used the Blender radiosity rendering for any of my renders but I understand the basics of the system.
Here are some of my core render setups that I use for all of my work.
http://www.solarflarestudios.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=132
http://www.solarflarestudios.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=100
In Blender I use Fake GI Sphere lighting for most of my superfast rendering needs. But the new radiosity features may change that.
Can you apply uv maps after the radiosity solution is complete?
Perhaps someone would write some comprehensive documentation on EnvMaps so that we can see them on more than just shiney spheres. EnvMaps are easy to apply to spheres (for me), but to use them effectivly on other surfaces is hard, IMO.
The lighting is really nice! I gotta try out the new radiosity
dante
The process is exactly the same for ANY object…so how is it any harder? I don’t get it…
Not really, the positioning of the empty (or whatever) for the texture co-ordinates differs from shape to shape. For planes and spheres it’s relatively easy, but becomes more difficult to find a good location for the empty for differently shaped objects. It’s fine if you just want it to look ‘shiny’, which is a nice and fast solution for most purposes but if you want it looking more realistic/accurate, then the envmaps won’t cut it. It’s the subtleties that, even while you may not notice them on first glance, just cause the pic to look a bit ‘wrong’ or CG.
For example, looking at those spheres, the distance between the spheres looks much larger in the reflection than it actually is. If (hypothetically) those spheres were the size of billiard balls, the distance between them looks to be about 10mm or less, however in the reflection, they look more like 20~30~40mm apart. This is (I presume) because the envmap was most likely calculated from the centre point of the sphere, rather than the surface, which means that the distances between reflected items will seem relative to the center. However moving the envmap co-ords away from the center of the sphere will make it look even weirder, so it’s a catch-22.
good reply broken
hmmm. these balls look like they were made with vector program, not 3d I think it’s the shadows. they are strange.
glad to see the new stuff in use tho.
.b
dewd thats awesome I didnt even know that blender radiosity is capable of something like that…
Broken:
That is actually wrong, a physically correct reflection would not have been calculated from the surface, but from the mirror point relative to the camera, which is far behind the sphere. So your logic is a bit inverse there!
(sorry to hijack this thread somewhat)
Yeah you’re right about that :). What I mean though is that the reflection seems like it’s coming off the centre of the object, when it should be coming off the surface.
Here’s a little test image to demonstrate:
http://reblended.com/www/broken/etc/envmaptest.jpg
The two spheres are touching each other, as you can see in this blender screenshot, however in the reflection, there’s a big gap between them.
Just a tradeoff, I guess. There’s a time and a place for everything and I think that includes both environment mapping and raytracing.
can someone PLEASE tell me where there is info on the new radiosity in 2.28?!? I can’t find it anywhere. 
