Questions on lights rendering

[runejw]

Here's the what I based the statement on in the other thread:


Caustics
This is a switch which sets the Photon Mapping to render caustics instead of rendering indirect illumination. It basically turns OFF both Final Gathering and Precompute Irradiance and turns ON a filter for the photon irradiance calculation.

Quote taken from this page:
http://www.ypoart.com/tutorials/Photon-Parameters.htm

Also have a look at:
http://www.ypoart.com/tutorials/Photon-Mapping.htm
and
http://www.ypoart.com/Tutorials.htm

Even if I dumped AM as of V8.5 - I must say it looks to have had a positive development in the rendering department.

Also if you stay with AM and pay the yearly upgrade/bugfix fees it can be quite fun when they improve the product. For myself however I found it after a while to be annoying that they would never truly bugfix some things, before launching the next great version of AM. Basically their programmers also seem to pick up ideas on Siggraph for cool things to implement - but the quality of the implementation can be very "beta" sometimes.

But I haven't used v10.5 or any version after v8.5, so other people may have more balanced views on that. Rendertimes would be interesting for either radiosity or caustics too... V 8.5 was super-slow (hours) with radiosity - but I think they redesigned the whole render engine since then...

Regarding klieg or spotlight, those are just different names for the same thing. Very few packages, even those offering options for linear or inverse square (etc) types of falloff are physically accurate in all respects - but then most people are more interested in fast, predictable and tunable lighting effects rather than 100% physically accurate lights or shadows. A nice example of this is the "Shadow designer" plugin for Lightwave
http://www.evasion3d.com
... so the focus is absolutely on "looks better" rather than "100% photo-real accurate"

Next - notice the price on "Shadowdesigner" - hmm, isn't that awfully close to the price of either AM or Carrara? :shrug:


Cheers,
Rune

P.S. One of the things that annoyed me in AM v8.5 was that volumetric light cones were not visible in reflections/mirrors. This was also the case for C2 but has been fixed in Carrara Studio 3 I read. Would be interesting if AM has fixed it also in v10.5

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