GI in EI

#23

Sure enough, the trick was to stop trying to impose a lighting style on the GI system, and let the GI be itself so to speak. So here’s a GI version of the Schofield scene that I’m happy with:

http://web.mac.com/marsviolet/iWeb/mark/TheSchofieldOutrage.html

Oh, Reuben, I don’t have a copy of the project uploaded at the moment, but if you still want to have a look at it, I’d be happy to upload it for you. All together the project, collected, is about 100 MB (mostly due to some needlessly large textures), but if that’s not too big, and you want to poke around, just let me know.

#24

Good job - looks fine to me.

I think some frustrations with 3d come from that - imposing a style or approach on tools not meant to be used ‘that’ way. EIM is a great example. If one uses it in a manner not really meant, it can snarl and snap but if used within it’s range of application it’s smooth as butter.

Yes, I guess Gibson copying PRS would have been a change:-)

#25

Yup much better, i probably still prefer the original though, guess a lot is down to taste and what the job requires.

if its no trouble then yeah 100mb no problem for me, have’nt opened EI for a while and need an excuse :slight_smile:

#26

Mark,
What was your final solution for the whiskey glass, which now has more red?

Everybody,
I’ve enjoyed this thread and apologize for my initial somewhat negative post about bugs.
I should learn more and speak less.

Jim Mulcahy

#27

What was your final solution for the whiskey glass, which now has more red?

Well, I’m not 100% sure, but I think what solved the whiskey glass problem was switching it over to secondary lighting. I say I’m not 100% sure because, frankly, I’m not even sure I’ve got the secondary lighting set up properly, but the final image is more or less satisfying so I’m not complaining.

As for the color of the whiskey being redder, that I think is simply due to the lighting being different. The whiskey material itself hasn’t changed, just the amount and type of light dancing around in it. So really it’s not so much redder as darker.

#28

Yeah, the colorful one has a groove I really like. It’s art versus realism, I guess.

if its no trouble then yeah 100mb no problem for me, have’nt opened EI for a while and need an excuse :slight_smile:

I’ve uploaded both projects — the original and the GI version. They’re at the bottom of The Schofield Outrage page:

http://web.mac.com/marsviolet/iWeb/mark/TheSchofieldOutrage.html

I did a little housecleaning and got the archives down to 33.2 MB each.

#29

I agree with Reuben, you can’t use the same lighting set up that you used to ‘fake’ the scene and expect a good result. The light sources need to be mimicking the natural light available in the room.

Paul, that looks like a PRS, although there’s not the usual name logo on the headstock. I thought you’d discounted PRS…

Martin K

#30

‘Paul, that looks like a PRS, although there’s not the usual name logo on the headstock. I thought you’d discounted PRS…’

Sorry for the completely irrelevant comments to this thread.

Yes, it is a PRS but the Santana models are unique in many ways. I had gone through a number of PRS guitars over the years and eventually sold them as they felt a little characterless. I got this one at a Boxing Week sale at a huge discount and once I swapped out the pickups and increased the string size, feel comfortable I’m hanging onto it…at least for a week. Kidding on that. I think this one will stay.

#31

Got the files Mark, thanks.

Its a pretty complex project now i see it, lots of camera maps, 330 textures ? and lights all over the place, having the exact same problems when enabling GI, its a pitty that so many changes are needed to use the feature, the price of progress…

If i have any “interesting” results i’ll post them here.

#32

Yeah, there’s a lot of stuff in there, and probably a lot more geometry than really necessary. One of the things I did before uploading was I deleted all the disabled temporary experimental shaders and textures, so it was actually even more complicated before I uploaded it. The “table” plane had three 16-bit (!!!) texture maps derived from photos from my 10D. I converted those to 8-bit high quality JPEGs before sending. That shaved about 60 MB off the archive size right there. I’m a pretty sloppy worker…

Anyway, go to town. Feel free to change the thing completely. Maybe the Schofield scene can be the new Sponza Cathedral!

#33

Sorry for the completely irrelevant comments to this thread.

Not at all. I encourage this sort of chaos. It creates energy or something. Good vibes. It’s fun.

#34

Funny you should mention Sponza, that project wasn’t available in EI format and i converted it from .obj or something, the original lighting settup was lost, but i suspect it turned out much better due to that fact, the way i did it was pretty simple, only using 2 lights and 1 bounce (i think), could have done it with one light if RT shadows had an opacity control…

btw, where is the dints shader from ?, i can’t find it in the standard EI shaders.

#35

Dents is from Konkeptoine’s Conception One shader package:

http://www.konkeptoine.com/2C1/F/C1_intro_F.htm

I love their stuff.

#36

Yeah, I think I must have had to convert it too. I remember messing with it for a good week or so, determined to outdo all the GI versions using a fancy phong setup, but I don’t think I ever submitted my version. I see that I still have the project here, though…

#37

Mark,
Thanks for your response on the whiskey glass (several messages ago).
Jim Mulcahy

#38

Thanks for your response on the whiskey glass (several messages ago).

No problem.

I’ve been making tweaks here and there to the GI version of this scene. I put a little light accent on the bullets to bring them out of the shadow a bit, enabled RT soft shadows, and added another RT recursion to the whiskey to fill out its reflections. I also decided to take the render hit and added the whiskey glass and whiskey back into the normal GI calculation rather than passing them off to secondary, cause I decided I liked the look of it better that way — seems to look more natural — and was pleased to see that the weird blocky red artifacting I was seeing before has vanished. Not sure why, really, but I’ll take what I can get. This is a tidy 3 hour render now on my really-showing-its-age G4 PowerBook, but it sure beats the 22 hours the original took when I had my soft shadow settings all screwy. Anybody know when the Universal Binary version of EI is coming out? It sure would be nice to throw two Intel cores at this stuff. I’ve read that just one of those cores is something like 5 to 7 times the crunching power of what I’m living with right now. Sure would be nice.

#39

6.6 is very nearly done, it’s WELL into beta testing so not too long I would think, still a few bugs that need squashing though.

Ian

#40

That’s exciting. Of course, it means I’ll have to upgrade my hardware. . . .

#41

Wasn’t that Red Blocky thing an Error indicator of some sort?

#42

Well 66 will still work on PPC OSX… But it is a good excuse to get a new machine :wink:

The red glass artefacts we caused by another bug, it was thought (I thought) that this bug was fixed ages ago… Apparently not entirely…

Let us hope it is never seen again!
Ian