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View Full Version : Final Gather- Lighting without using lights.

dweinin
08-16-2005, 03:46 PM
Hello All,

I have been experimenting with lighting up my scenes (just a room) without using lights at all. The problem is that I cannot get a smooth even light throught my scene. I am using mental ray, final gather and the incandescnet attribute of my lambert shader. I have played with many of the attributes in my Render Globals; sampling, final gather rays, min/max radius. But I cannot get this to work like I Think it should.

All of the walls (except for the ceiling) are mapped with a gray Lambert. And I have also tried using a Mental Ray Lambert Shader.

The Ceiling is mapped with a Lambert Shader. I have a grid map linked to the incandescent attribute. The white part of the grid has a value of 4 (which I can increase to get a higher intensity of light... but still no even spread) while the black is... well, black.

I'm doing this to try and get the look of flourescent lighting in a drop ceiling environment. Using a cheap and quick set up and render method.

Does anyone have any ideas on how to make this process work or have any good links?

Thanks to all in advance.

I'm running Maya 6.0 on a Mac.

-Dweinin
LehaS
08-16-2005, 03:56 PM
"default links" are :) :

http://www.lamrug.org/index.html
http://www.jupiter-jazz.com/wordpress/wp-content/data/tr4kv2/html/chapter1-FG.html
http://www.treddi.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=8436&st=0
Sphere♥
08-17-2005, 05:49 AM
This won't help but I think final gather was optimized in 6.5. Since your scene is simple I tried a similar test using Maya 7 for the fun of it: simple cube with grid texture on surfaceshader on top face, grey lambert for all other sides. Rendered with PreviewFinalGather preset with rays set to 1000. High ray count and still some noise, but with tweaking it would probably work. However using only final gather to light works best when an object is surrounded by a bright environment.
playmesumch00ns
08-17-2005, 08:03 AM
Why not just use area lights for this? While final gather may do some kind of optimisation to try and find the brightest areas in the scene, it's never going to be as good as just telling mental ray where the light is.
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08-17-2005, 08:03 AM
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