HELP!!! Luminous polys are not luminous

[fabmedia]

I'm wondering what I'm doing wrong... I've set the luminosity of some polygons to act like lights for Global Illumination, but they are not affecting the environment. It's an office setting, 100% luminous, cast no shadows or any of that stuff. It's just not working.

Help...

Arlen

[richpr]

From the manual:

Luminosity

Luminosity refers to how much a surface appears to glow of its own light. However, unless you use Radiosity (Lights > Global: Global Illum), luminosity does not have any actual light emitting properties—you need to add an actual light for that. A value of 0% is most common for this setting, unless a special need arises such as the surface of a modeled light bulb. This surface property is not the same as Glow on the Advanced tab.

[fabmedia]

Right. I understand that. BUT when rendering with GI there are no light emitting properties at all. Now under 6 and 6.5 that was no problem. Maybe I'm just overlooking something....

Arlen

[richpr]

If you render with radiosity, they would reflect the light back... however I guess you would still need at least one light...

In the Inside Lightwave 7 book the famous head is rendered with radiosity in the last stage... 3 bright box polygons as bounce cards for lighting. The key light is changed to affect only specular (rim and fill light are turned off)...

Of course the radiosity settings are another thing altogether...

How did you setup the GI? I usually have it turned off or at something like 2-3%.

[hrgiger]

You do have Radiosity activated under the global illumination properties panel don't you?

How luminous is your object and what percentage do you have under your GI panel?

[fabmedia]

Yes radiosity is activated. The surfaces i've tried at 50-500% with no effect. The Radiosity setting is at 100%.

I've done this before, but hell if I know what is wrong. This is freaking me out...

Arlen

[Valter]

try with value between 500 - 1000 for luminosity

[hrgiger]

Actually, I would try boosting up the radiosity first before the luminosity. Try a value between 300-600%

[fabmedia]

Sorry, it doesn't work. Nothing at all. This is what really is stumping me...

Arlen

[richpr]

Show us your GI and Radiosity panels... ;)

[Simon]

Your luminous poly object, has it got 'unseen by rays' activated? That will stop it affecting the radiosity solution. That's the only thing I can think of!

Simon.

[fabmedia]

Nope. Unseen by rays is unchecked. This is really screwy. I wish I was just fooling around, but this is a freaking nightmare right now.

I'll keep plugging along, but OMG I'm at a loss for words.

Arlen

[fabmedia]

Here are my settings.. GI and object properties...

<a href="http://142.173.125.22/001.jpg">Object Properties</a>


<a href="http://142.173.125.22/002.jpg">GI Panel</a>

Arlen

[fabmedia]

Sorry, let's try that again...

http://142.173.125.22/001.jpg
http://142.173.125.22/002.jpg

Arlen

[Simon]

Just thought of something else ... are the luminous polys inside a transparant object (like a strip light inside a 'glass' tube)? If so you will need 'ray trace transparency' activated.

[policarpo]

activate your ambient intensity. you need this for most GI renders.

[fabmedia]

Well, ray-trace transparency is set. I find that the scenes render so much faster with it on (although, I'd like to hear what everyone else has to say about that). I double checked that the polygons are not transparent and are pointing in the right direction. I'm thinking of just packing up the scene and making it available for download VIA an email link or through private messaging.

Arlen

[fabmedia]

About the ambient intensity, I usually have it set to about 10% with GI, but I set it to zero to see if there was any effect.

Arlen

[thekho]

Something like that? See my pic below

try increase about 800% luminosity for polygon and turned off 0% both for light intensity and ambient intensity then use radiosity. That's all.

[policarpo]

i've also assembled a couple of tutorials which might be of help to you.

cheers!
this is using a simple jpeg to illuminate the scene...it renders rather quickly too.
http://www.policarpo.us/tutorials/downtown/hi-res_exposed.jpg
image courtesy of william "proton" vaughan



check here...and there's a link to another one within this one which might help you.


http://www.policarpo.us/tutorials/downtown/compare.htm

[Simon]

Hi fabmedia,

I've PM'd you my email address if you'd like me to try the scene on my machine. I'm on a 56k though so don't worry about including any of the images or most of the irrelevant objects if it's much over 1Mb !

Simon.

[fabmedia]

I'm wondering if my luminous percentages of the polygons are too low... I tried 50 and 100 percent. Mind you, I have 6 at 50% (and then set to 100) and two larger at 100%.

Arlen

[thekho]

Hi policarpo

[thekho]

Hi policarpo

Nice tutorial! Thanks for it.

Cheers

Keddy

P.S. I like your website. It looks cool :)

fabmedia- What for? Interior room or out scene or test? I think you should increase high like 500% than your previous 100% luminous.

[toby]

1. Start with a fresh scene with just a ground plane and a cube - just to see if it's LW acting up or your scene settings/objects

2. Post that scene! we want to try it -

[fabmedia]

Okay, I'll post the scene for everyone to take a peak. I was only going to do so by "secret" download, but here it is... http://142.173.125.22/office.sit

I'll set up a new scene and see how it goes. I'll get back to you ASAP.

BTW, I took out some objects so don't be alarmed. There are lights in the scene, but just turn them off. AND please let me know if I'm going insane.

Cheers!
Arlen

[toby]

that link's dead

[fabmedia]

Okay. Some depressing tests here....

cube on plane 250% illumination
http://142.173.125.22/test01.jpg

cube in room 250% illumination
http://142.173.125.22/test02.jpg

room lit by "lights" 250% illumination
http://142.173.125.22/test03.jpg


The room with lights are in the previous download file. I don't know what is going on, but somethings REALLY screwed.

Arlen

[fabmedia]

Sorry the previous link didn't have the file where it was supposed to be...

Source files
http://142.173.125.22/office.sit

[toby]

well it seems to render ok

It looks like the rendered image you included in the download -

[fabmedia]

did you set all the lights to 0%?

Arlen

[fabmedia]

How long did it take you to render and what is your system like? I'm just trying to see what my system is rendering out like in comparison to everyone elses,,,


Arlen

[toby]

Originally posted by fabmedia
did you set all the lights to 0%?

Arlen

:D
no, was I supposed to?

my system is pretty slow, I only rendered the limited region and it took 3 1/2 minutes:
G4 dual 450
OS10.2.3
1 gb ram

I'll do it again

[toby]

yea it just looks like a field of stars - black with some bright specks. I've even cranked up the intensity and the sampling - and also the luminosity, if you want a luminous object to mimic a real light, it needs to be more than just 100% luminous. I put them at 1000%.

I find in some situations like this you just have to crank things up 'til they work! With caustics you might need an intensity anywhere from .5% to 5000% (I've used both) But usually, something is goofy, I'm still looking at it

[toby]

I realize now that I've never done any interior radiosity before - I've always had the backdrop to brighten things up

I replaced your lights with bigger polygons with luminosity set to 500 and radiosity set to 500. I think it's more effective to have a large poly instead of many small ones.

Sampling needs to be pretty high, this is set at 10X30 and I used Monte Carlo instead of Interpolated - I haven't figured out how to get good results with Interpolated.

This took 17 minutes on my old buzzbox with no AA and only 1 bounce ( and thousands of polys removed ).

[fabmedia]

17 minutes. Hmmmm. I have a G4 Dual 867 with 1 Gb RAM and I can't get anywhere near those speeds on X.2.5

I wonder what is wrong with my system...


Arlen

[toby]

probably because I only used 1 bounce. It takes exponentially longer with every extra bounce - I don't even try on my system ! I also chopped the scene down, it had less than 500 polygons

[Matt]

I've had similar annoyance with HDRI / GI.

I can get backdrop radiosity looking great no problem, but as soon as I need to do something in an interior (blocking out backdrop) everything is just too dark and incredibly slow.

As a result I never use Monte Carlo radiosity.

I have a similar gripe with area / linear lights, although not as bad they are still almost unusably slow on _some_ scenes.

(I have a Dual Xeon 2.0Ghz / 1GB RAM box BTW).

But I could just be crap, I've seen amazing stuff in the gallery!

LightWave does need a massive speed boost for these high end features, in a commercial environment they can be unusable which is a shame.

[toby]

I don't think LW is much slower than anyone else - these are just render-intensive features, we need faster machines! - I hear that Digital Domain uses HDR to light everything they do ( they render everything in LW )

[fabmedia]

Yes, I can't figure out why things are so slow. But I just can't figure out why this is such an issue. I'm thinking of posting this in the Tech support forum and see the results I get...

Arlen

[Neil_Campbell]

I don't think LW is much slower than anyone else - these are just render-intensive featuresHmmm. Think you'll find a lot of people disagreeing with that. Sure, these are render intensive features, but that doesn't alter the fact that LW is miles behind the competition when it comes to the features and speed of their implementation of multi-bounce radiosity.

we need faster machinesAmen to that :)

[fabmedia]

I would love to know how I can light the scene so that it does not look like it was lit with radiosity AND without the radiosity cheat. I was really interested in G2 when it came out, but after hearing how difficult it was to learn (and my budget) I decided not too.

I'm still stumped though. Why would a single polygon outside light better than being inside? I know that there are more bounces, but does the size of the polygon make that much of a difference? I would figure that the same number of rays would come out of each polygon, and that the increase in the amount of polygons would increase the number of rays....


Arlen

[toby]

Originally posted by fabmedia
I would love to know how I can light the scene so that it does not look like it was lit with radiosity AND without the radiosity cheat.

I'm still stumped though. Why would a single polygon outside light better than being inside? I know that there are more bounces, but does the size of the polygon make that much of a difference? I would figure that the same number of rays would come out of each polygon, and that the increase in the amount of polygons would increase the number of rays....


which radiosity cheat are you referring to?

Lighting outside is easier because you have the 'sky' to help out - when inside every bit of light has to come from just a few polygons. Why don't use lights instead of luminous polys?

[fabmedia]

Yes, I am going to use the lights now. I just have figure out how to get the glass covers of the lights to act like there is something behind them without the luminous polys affecting the render speed.

The render cheat that I was referring to was the spinning lights.

Arlen

[toby]

You can have luminous polys without increasing the render time, it's just when you try to light the whole scene with them that you have to turn up the radiosity sampling, that's what makes it take longer -

[Arnie Cachelin]

DO NOT TURN THE AMBIENT INTENSITY DOWN ON RADIOSITY SCENES.

Try 35% minimum.

[Neil_Campbell]

DO NOT TURN THE AMBIENT INTENSITY DOWN ON RADIOSITY SCENES.

Try 35% minimum.
It was recognised a while back that this is only true if you want to use a kludge for trying to fake multi-bounce radiosity inside LightWave. Non-zero ambient in radiosity-based scenes simply uses the ambient light levels to fake higher order diffuse scattering (ie multi-bounce), instead of calculating these components. This technique is simply a way of trying to sidestep a long-standing major weakness in LightWave, namely the fact that NewTek has implemented an horrendously slow multi-bounce radiosity engine.

To be fair, there are some scenes where keeping ambient non-zero can work because it might give you a reasonable approximation to higher order components of the radiosity solution, and in a fraction of the time it would normally take to calculate a true multi-bounce solution. But similarly there are also a lot of other scenes, some of them extremely simple, where this technique demonstrably gives total garbage in terms of accuracy and aesthetics of the lighting solution, and is simply not usable.

So as with many things in 3D, there is no simple answer, and this approach of "not turning ambient off when using radiosity" should not be taken as gospel, because such a blanket statement is both too narrow and much of the time will be totally wrong.

[fabmedia]

I did use ambient for this scene... http://142.173.125.22/landscape_web.jpg

I had set the ambient to 15% used background radiosity, 1 area light, and then one distant light from behind. It turned out like I had expected. I do believe that the ambient light is important but does need to be used carefully.

Arlen

[Neil_Campbell]

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying ambient light has no value in these situations - indeed it can sometimes do wonders for a radiosity-based image - but just as often it does nothing other than wash out the contrast and flatten the image.

Using non-zero ambient light to fake higher order radiosity solutions is not a panacea, and it shouldn't be considered the default.

CAPITALISATION FROM ARNIE IN EXILE NOT WITHSTANDING ;)

[fabmedia]

right'o. I understand that premise. I use ambient quite sparingly.

Out of curiousity. Who uses the radiosity cheat and how often?

Arlen

[Arnie Cachelin]

Ok, no more shouting, but the ambent lighting w/ radiosity is totally different from ambient without it. It is not a kludge, but a good approximation, according even to the inventor of the photon mapping algorithm used for calculating Global Illumination, Henrik Jensen. If 2 bounces are used, then the ambient intensity approximates the results of the 3rd and higher bounce. Yes it is not directional, but with each succeeding bounce the actual GI solution becomes less directional, and the color bleeding effects are also washed out, assuming a varied distribution of diffuse reflectors in the scene.
While there are many hacks to spare the computer extra calculations, this is one of the most accurate available. Not using reasonable ambient levels just dooms you to long renders and/or splotches. You don't have to believe me, just try some comparison renders.

Also, as I have noted elsewhere, using luminous polys instead of lights is not a very good technique, since the renderer needs to hit those polys bu chance, rather than knowing exactly where they are, and how big, in the case of ares or linear lights.

As fun as it is to complain about your tools, it is useful to learn them inside and out. I'm not sure what fast multi-bounce GI program you are referring to, but in general, radiosity is still considered impractical for production, unless the results are baked in advance.

[toby]

The Architcture people are pretty peaved about radiosity speed - how about a tutorial or some example comparisons of lighting with Ambient on?

[fabmedia]

Okay here's the image that I was talking about. Now this has 9 lights, 15% ambient 3 bounces... 7 hours on G4 dual 867 with 1Gb of RAM.

http://142.173.125.22/01.jpg

Arlen

[Neil_Campbell]

but the ambent lighting w/ radiosity is totally different from ambient without it
I agree - to a point - but it still gives residual (and often undesirable) ambient-like behaviour - such as lack of contrast, dark shadows or proper light falloff
It is not a kludge
Okay, possibly a poor choice of word on my part - it's an approximation / fake / hack / workaround of sorts - I wasn't trying to imply your algorithm was total junk, because it clearly has its uses - but as would be expected of any area of software development, significant improvements have been made to GI techniques over the past 3 years - unfortunately LW simply hasn't exploited these advances
but a good approximation
hmmm
If 2 bounces are used, then the ambient intensity approximates the results of the 3rd and higher bounce.
I've agreed with that previously, yes, that's exactly what it does
Yes it is not directional but with each succeeding bounce the actual GI solution becomes less directional, and the color bleeding effects are also washed out, assuming a varied distribution of diffuse reflectors in the scene.
And it's here we disagree. Yes, the higher order bounces do become progressively less directional, and wash out. But the problem with lack of accurate representation of directional scattering of the higher orders, and reliance on uniform ambient light, is that there are scenes where this lack of directionality and inherent falloff of the underlying ambient light level simply doesn't work. This was covered before (a couple of years ago IIRC) when NT first released their implementation of multi-bounce and everyone saw just how big the render hit was and tried to find workarounds. There are scenes where you want dark shadows, such as underneath a sofa, but can't get them because the ambient light level washes out the shadows. There are others where the geometry and lighting situation should result in a gradual falloff of the overall light levels to zero (such as in a winding staircase lit from one window at the bottom) but again the ambient level trick holds the overall light levels up to the value specified by the ambient light. This is not just physically incorrect, it looks crap too.
While there are many hacks to spare the computer extra calculations, this is one of the most accurate available.
Quite possibly. In fact it's the only one I'm aware of amongst the major packages. None of the others seem to need a hack - possibly they have more efficient multi-bounce engines.
Not using reasonable ambient levels just dooms you to long renders and/or splotches.
With LightWave's render engine, yes, you probably are for many scenes. My experience certainly supports that. But don't lose sight of the fact that using 'reasonable' ambient levels in some scenes can doom you instead to poor results - fast perhaps, but certainly not accurate.
You don't have to believe me, just try some comparison renders.
It's not a question of belief Arnie - I understand and agree with what you're saying in some cases - what I'm hoping you'll agree to is that there are scenes where this approach to faking higher order bounces doesn't give you the results you would want for a realistic lighting solution.
Also, as I have noted elsewhere, using luminous polys instead of lights is not a very good technique, since the renderer needs to hit those polys bu chance, rather than knowing exactly where they are, and how big, in the case of ares or linear lights.
Yep. I've also found the best way is to render the luminous polys (ie have them visible to camera and rays) but specifically exclude them from the radiosity calculation, and to have (normally area or soft shadow spot) lights behind them actually doing the photon casting. That way you still get the visible poly which represents the light's surface showing directly in the camera and in reflections, but with a real light behind it doing the radiosity work - far more efficient and it gives a cleaner overall solution.
As fun as it is to complain about your tools, it is useful to learn them inside and out.
I won't respond to your insulting my ability or knowledge. I'll simply say that you're wide of the mark on that point Arnie, and I think you know it. You know as well as I do that this is not about learning to use the tools, but being aware of their limitations and knowing which workarounds do work, which don't, when and why. I may not have coded the algorithms, but that doesn't mean I don't know how to use the software. Nor does it stop me identifying a weakness in the software. I've said previously that there are uses for the ambient light fake. I've also said there are cases when it isn't useful. I'm not making a blanket statement about it one way or the other.
I'm not sure what fast multi-bounce GI program you are referring to
You're right of course, they're extremely hard to come by. In no particular order of capability / preference / price:
- Cinema 4D
- Max with finalRender
- Max with VRay
- Max with Brazil
- Max with MR
- Max with its native GI engine
- Maya
- XSI
but in general, radiosity is still considered impractical for production, unless the results are baked in advance.
Are you thinking about animation? In which case, you may be correct - it's not something I do so am not qualified to comment on. But for architectural / design visualisation stills, my experience has been totally the opposite. Radiosity is not only useful, it is often nigh on essential in this market - and production use is quite possible.

[lardbros]

Sorry to who put that comment about other packages being faster and way ahead, but i have to disagree...
Max with Radiosity is a joke, and really NOT easy to set up in comparison! Havnt even bothered trying with XSI. Come on... with lightwave its like switching on another light and it works, i found it easy to use and the results come back quicker and better quality than the others ive used... although the Brazil for Max isnt bad!

(I am HIGHLY biased though, so my opinion is most likely stupid!)

[toby]

Originally posted by fabmedia
Okay here's the image that I was talking about. Now this has 9 lights, 15% ambient 3 bounces... 7 hours on G4 dual 867 with 1Gb of RAM.

http://142.173.125.22/01.jpg

Arlen

Thanks fab, but what I meant was for Newtek to show us how to tweak Radiosity for speed and quality.

[Neil_Campbell]

Sorry to who put that comment about other packages being faster and way ahead, but i have to disagree...
Max with Radiosity is a joke, and really NOT easy to set up in comparison!
To each their own. Me, I've found it pretty straightforward to set up and use, but to be honest I don't really use it that much because Brazil is my tool of choice. That said, the times I have used it, my experience has been that the native radiosity engine in Max is ahead of LightWave in terms of features, and much faster as well when it comes to multi-bounce calculation. And the quality is pretty good as well. For some reason there's still this daft myth that the render engine in Max is crap - it's not, it's pretty capable, even with radiosity. And then if you buy a new render engine (yes I know that's more money) you get an awesome all-round package.

Come on... with lightwave its like switching on another light and it works, i found it easy to use and the results come back quicker and better quality than the others ive used... although the Brazil for Max isnt bad!
The quality LW is able to produce is amazing, but the renderer no longer leads the pack - now it lags, in terms of features and speed. And talking about speed, which other packages / render engines have you used? You mention Brazil. Was that the public test or the full version? Seriously, no one can honestly claim that LightWave is faster than Max with Brazil for radiosity. Likewise VRay or MR. Even Cinema 4D trounces LW in radiosity speed. In terms of radiosity engines, these packages are simply in a different league from LW - although to be fair to NT, that's why Brazil alone costs as much as a seat of LW in its entirety, VRay is half the price of a LW seat, and MR pricing is .... well ... just damned expensive. We'll just have to wait and see what, if anything, NT does in LW8 to address these issues.

(I am HIGHLY biased though, so my opinion is most likely stupid!)
Hey, no-one's perfect ;)

[Neil_Campbell]

but what I meant was for Newtek to show us how to tweak Radiosity for speed and quality
Toby, there was a post on the old NT forums where Arnie showed the use of interpolated radiosity with ambient lighting to get fast renders of an architectural scene (Sponza Attrium I believe). You may want to dig that out.

You mentioned previously you used Monte Carlo because you'd had some difficulty using interpolated. I can sympathise with that - it can take a bit of work to set up and does require experimentation - but it's worth it because using interpolated is one of the primary ways of speeding up radiosity in LW, especially if you need to use multiple bounces in your scene.

To experiment with interpolated settings, you want a fast, clean scene. So first of all I've found it best to switch off any complex procedurals in my scene (like DarkTree), switch off reflections (but keep shadows on), turn down the quality of any area lights (from 4 or 5 to 2 or 3). Then I set the resolution to something tiny like 320x240, and rays to 1x3. Again, just to get a quick scene that allows me to see the overall distribution of light and to check whether interpolated is doing what I need it to do. Then I just play around with the settings for Tolerance and Min Eval Spacing - albeit in a logical fashion. I try and do it reasonably methodically by holding Tolerance constant at say 0.2 and moving MES through 1m, 100cm, 10cm, 1cm (or whatever's appropriate for your scene), then changing Tolerance to 0.4 and repeating the variation of MES again, and making a note of which settings look best, and their speed.

Then I pick the one which gives me a reasonable trade off between quality of overall light distribution and speed.

Then I increase the resolution and do a couple of limited region renders with more rays, say 3x9 at the chosen Tolerance and MES and check that I'm getting decent lighting. Normally I'll check a couple of large plain areas (such as walls) for splotches / mottling, and around the base of objects where there's shadow and reflected light at work. If I'm happy with the output for the chosen interpolated values, I'll switch on the procedurals, reflections etc and check the solution again using limited region, and if that looks good, crank up AA and resolution and render the full scene.

Setting this up is not as fast I'd like (after all, MC doesn't give you any parameters to play with), but it can be worth it - I might play with the settings for interpolated for an hour or so to pick the optimal set for my scene. That sounds like a long time, but that hour has given me decent interpolated output in 4-5 hours compared to 20-40 hours (I kid you not) for Monte Carlo of marginally better accuracy.

[toby]

Wow - thanks for all the info. Sounds like you've got it all figured out.

I did figure out Intrplated a little bit, but for what I do it doesn't seem to help much: my system is really old and slow so my settings are always minimal anyway, and it still takes too long to experiment with - I normally use an inverted box and no AA to test with - no area lights either, much less reflections!

I'll be learning much more soon, I just started working for an Arch-viz studio (using Max & fR)

I'll look for those old posts

thanks
toby

[lardbros]

B]And talking about speed, which other packages / render engines have you used?[/B]



Ive used pretty much every package out there. Im not just talking about speed though... XSI's renderer (to me) seems very poor indeed and EXTREMELY slow at simple raytracing!
True Cinema 4d has one of the, if not THE, fastest renderers but... still i have found Lightwaves feature set the best for its out of the box package! Max's renderer was the poorest around until version 4 popped up, and now its improved beyond recognition. No more JPEG style fuzzing when rendering out anything... i still use it for some work. But where lightwave steals it for me is when you render something with just a couple of lights and a simple background the results still manage to look decent and kinda professional... although still have probs with non-planar polys and shadows which really does my head in!

Im gonna leave this now anyway, ive got into this and its waaay above my head! You guys know what you're talking about!

[colkai]

This maybe a dumb statement, probably is ;)
But.. given the limitations of the radiosity in LW that are being discussed, why don't folks just export the scene to the superior renderer and use that to get the better result.

After all, it is done the other way around, animating in Maya then exporting to LW to render. That way, you can get the result you want.
I guess I don't understand as to why a studio would use an inferior product on a project when they know there are better alternatives.
Why try to undo a screw with a penknife when you know the powerdriver will do it both faster and easier ??

Just a thought from left-field :p

[Neil_Campbell]

given the limitations of the radiosity in LW that are being discussed, why don't folks just export the scene to the superior renderer and use that to get the better result.
That's exactly what I do sometimes because I still find it easier to model in LW than Max. But then you lose the benefits of things like Luxigons, which can be extremely useful for scenes with lots of lights.

That said, for a lot of my architectural work I tend to do a fair bit of raw modelling in ArchiCAD anyway, then tweak / clean the mesh and add in details using another package - I can just as easily import that to Max as LW, and if I render in Max, it makes sense to use it for modelling as well. But while I'm trying to do more modelling within Max itself, while it is very powerful it's also a totally different workflow and takes some getting used to after so many years of LW. :(

So here's hoping LW8.0 will have a new radiosity engine that makes this discussion moot :D

[policarpo]

for what it is worth, when I see stuff like this coming out of LightWave, I know that it is the artist and the tool working together to produce amazing work:
Proof is in the pudding (http://www.cgtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=84813&perpage=15&highlight=akira&pagenumber=8)

Use whatever you can afford and whatever helps you to get your work done.

Sure, we could always use a speed boost, but I am happy with my optimizations i've learned to tweak out of LightWave. It is flexible enough for me and I can't see investing another $5,000.00 in another application and rendering package when I can do most everything i need in LW and in post.

(note: i've used 3dsmax quite a bit, but I am turned off by discreets practices and the lack of integrated tools. who can honestly say that 3dsmax 6 deserved a point release...it should have been version 5.5. it's cool that it has an open and flexible rendering architecture, but don't you think they should just invest in R&D and get a spot on integrated rendering engine out of the box...sure mental ray is there now...but mental ray is slow when it comes to GI and HDRI calculations...as an artist, you need to push your system to it's breaking point and learn how to best exploit it's features so you can get work done quickly and efficiently).

Cheers,

[Neil_Campbell]

Yep, there's a lot that can be done in post - and it's often much faster too (blurred reflections being one current example for LW).

But there are some things that are hard to do in post, such as faking multi-bounce radiosity, and there's only so many tweaks and optimisations available within the current LW toolset - hence the number of architectural vis guys using something other than LW for their work, as well as the number of requests for a more capable and faster GI engine. Really it's just a mirror image of the requests for better CA we saw until Siggraph. NT appears to have addressed the shortfalls in CA relative to the competition, so the CA guys are happy and keeping quiet, but it looks like they didn't have time to address issues in the render core. Guess that makes it 'our' turn next.

I agree with the overall sentiment though - use whatever tools satisfy your personal criteria, and try and strike the right balance between price, ease of use / workflow, speed and functionality. I'm honest enough to admit on a LW forum that for me, for architectural work, that's Max.

But at the end of the day, most of my clients don't give a **** what tools I use - all they're interested in is that I can deliver the quality they're looking for, at a reasonable price, in a timescale that they can live with. Oh the joys of freelancing as a one-man outfit, and not having to integrate my workflow with Alias-based studios :D

[Ender_McFurious]

Are all ray traced options on? I think that shadows and reflections would be the only things that would stop it if they're off. I don't remember anyone suggesting reflections turned on, but if somone already suggested this, then my bad, I'm tired.

oh wow... major thread rez. Forgot I dug this one up while searching... oops