New type of lighting system, Photonic

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
1

I have been able to approximate a photonic render based on particles to make emission,

I have been able to approximate what it may look like using volumetrics, and using a point density based on

A. a dense cone-Flash light halo that is a mesh - makes convincing “Halo” but casts no shadow and can only make emmissions happen in a cone…

B. a hose type particle emitter and extreme stickyness on the surfaces"lit" by the particles radius, what I was thinking is if the volume could re-emit the particle and be lit by it, but right now this only lights a single bounce.

if it could pick up color off a bounce, leave behind illumination, and have less energy on the next bounce and leave behind the previous color, for each bounce, you could make a particle based rendering method.

Another method is dynamic painting each surface with particles that are emitted by your “Light” and making a dynamic emission map from the data, this works but I think I am doing it the hard-way using PaintCache.png->sequencer->.mp4->emission map, I think it could be done with nodes much easier but I am having trouble wrapping my brain around it…

Help? I think a particle based volumetric render could be considered “Photonic”

2

Mitsuba has a mode that approximates like this I believe. It is incredibly slow and is really only there as a proof of concept.

3

The dynamic paint mode->Paintcache->sequencer-movie-emission was fast, except I don’t know how to turn that into code I just did it in steps,

4

I’ve no idea what you’re actually talking about, but basically you describe the idea of photon mapping, which is around for a decade now.

5

Using dynamic paint to produce an emit map, possibly in real time

So Particle emiter is a brush
Lit surfaces are canvas,
The resulting map is used as an emission map, but this only works with baking, I was thinking some type of shader might do it in real time.