Lights? Lots of small or few big?

[MF3dream]

There you must take into account several consideration, I think...first and foremost your shadow algorithm (shadow type). If you use shadow maps then generally more lights with less detailed shadows (I mean shadow map res and sampling) are faster rendered.
Also you are using FG which cast the rays from geometry to the scene and if you have larger, more intense lights you loss the adaptiveness of your renderer because there are large areas with highly bright spots. so more small/less intense/and low quality lights in terms of settings, do the job faster for you as I told IN GENERAL...There might be other purposes based on your scene...
And Finally don't forget that fewer/more lights are more pleasant because they create more subtle lighting effects again AS GENERAL:D.

[JazzyAnimator]

Righty-O, sounds good to me.

I understand how to light and what makes a good picture, just wasn't sure about the background side of things. Granted, as you said having large lights usually requires more work in the end to get rid of those hotspots and tweaking to get those dark corners lit up, not to mention the lighting is generally "harder" as I call it.

Thanks.

[MF3dream]

Hi again...I missed one important point in my last post where I told "the bigger/more intense light sources gives you highly bright spots".
Most important things to remember is when you have highly bright spots then you have consequently a bright scene...your renderer trys to sample the areas that actually don't need high sampling count, so the render time goes up...noise and blotchiness
appears:argh:....etc.
And yes that need more tweaking as well!:hmm:

Sorry for my Eng and thanks...

[Nawbean]

in my opinion if he is using fg and stufs to render then aint it good to use very few area ights with economical intensity

aint it economical to compute fg points.

[MikeBracken]

Some other things to consider when choosing lighting setup.....

Fewer large lights when raytracing area shadows can be problematic because the larger the lights the more noise in the area shadows, and can take a lot of sampling to clean up.


More smaller lights when using raytraced area shadows can sometimes take longer because there are more calcs to make, but generaly less noisy. I personally cant recomend either because it usually depends on the scene, eg, how complex the geometry and shaders are, type of exposure, gamma, etc.

This is probably not that helpful, but I make these decisions mostly on a scene by scene basis.

Regards,
Mike

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