Surface baking and radiosity.

[andym323]

Hello boys and girls :D

I'm truying to set up a scene that involves an interior of the company office, built fine, surfaced fine, however, there are alot of lights to go in and even having spent the last two days trying to optimise the lighting and rad settings, we're looking at massive times per frame to render!

So, I thought, perhaps I could bake the lighting and save some time :D

Now, I've been using LW since 5.6 but I've NEVER baked a single thing before, mad I know, but there you go ;)

Does anyone have any tips, trick, perhaps even a good tutorial I could play with??? So far I've managed to get it to bake the surfaces of a test scene, but how does I get the baked surfaces onto the mesh? I've gone for bake to object by the way, having used proceedural textures on my test :)

Any help from y'all would be fantastic :D

Cheers

Andy

[MooseDog]

since your using v9.5, i'll assume you're all over the radiosity baking aspect. it really helps.

for baking textures, using the surface baking camera, you'll have to take a step backwards to modeler and create uv's for the objects in your scene. they don't need to be complicated, as they're placeholders. search for the "plg" suite of uv tools, and use them to create atlas uv's. (don't bake specular, reflection or bump info though as they depend usually on the camer's incidence angle)

[andym323]

Thanks MooseDog :)

Gotta say though, I'm new to the rad baking, could use a few hints on that too ;)

And this surface baking camera, I' keep reading about it, but I havn't found it yet, excuse my ignorance ;)

[BeeVee]

In the camera Properties panel - it's just another camera to choose from, like Perspective or Real Lens.

B

[andym323]

Thanks Ben :D

This baking illumination is doing my head in *scratch*

[Exception]

Thanks Ben :D

This baking illumination is doing my head in *scratch*

You have already tried radiosity baking? Yes? That's different from surface baking. Surface baking ends up being much faster, but is much more work to set up. Radiosity baking will remove the radiosity calculation time entirely.

Radiosity baking, is called radiosity caching. It's an option in the GI panel.

[andym323]

Yeah, I've got that sussed, thanks Tom :)

Guys, whats the difference between baking a surface to an image as opposed to a VMap?

Also, I'm a little confused, I tried switching on the Surface Baker for the surfaces I wanted baked. Then did a render, which started baking surfaces, fine I thought.

So once that was done I turned of the lights and the radiosity and rendered again, thing is it started baking again *scratch*

I was using VMaps by the way, how do I tell it the surfaces have already been baked and to apply them, or am i getting this all upside down ;)

andy

[andym323]

In the camera Properties panel - it's just another camera to choose from, like Perspective or Real Lens.

B

Do you have to do this for every object in the scene?

If so, say I'm creating an office scene with lots of desks and chairs, and say those desks and chairs are all cloned in layout, how ill that affect things?

Would the solution in those circumstances be to surface bake the room and any individual objects and leave the multiple objects to cast and recieve independantly?

Andy

[Sensei]

Do you have to do this for every object in the scene?

Yes.


If so, say I'm creating an office scene with lots of desks and chairs, and say those desks and chairs are all cloned in layout, how ill that affect things?

After baking one object attribute, they will affect all clones or instances.


Would the solution in those circumstances be to surface bake the room and any individual objects and leave the multiple objects to cast and recieve independantly?


While baking surface to image file, you don't want any light to be affecting it. Otherwise all clones or instances will have wrong lighting..

I have made special tool for removing any lighting SurfaceBakingLights which is available on my website.

[Mr Rid]

I think you may spend more time trying to figure this out and baking dozens of objects than it would take to just render the scene. Am wondering if there isnt a way to optimize the scene in the first place. What kind of processing power do you have, how many frames, and at what res? What are your radiosity and camera settings? Do you have one 3D light for each light source in the actual office? Some people use too many cheater lights. How many of each light type? What are the area light Q settings?

[andym323]

Thanks Sensei, that means the cloned items will be just surface baked without lighting which would be rendered normally?

Mr Rid, I was planning on rendering 5 or 6 sections of the interior, all would be pans, tilts and focus pulls between 100 and 150 frames @ D1 PAL (widescreen), here are the Camera, Render and GI settings as of yesterday...

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v244/andym323/settingscopy.jpg

As for the lights, there are 8 downlighter spots in the ceiling of the hallway, these are photometeics, the fluorecent tubes in the main room were origionalyy photometrics too, specifically DP Tube lights, of which there were 20, two to each light unit, these got swapped out for area lights at quality 4, which in turn got replaced with DP Tube lights only half as many this time, one per housing. There is also a distant light for sunlight and ambient is set to 25%. The remaining 3 rooms in the model have been left unlit for the time being and their doors closed. My computing power is detailed in my sig below :)

Hope that all makes sense :)

P.S. Love your reel :D

[andym323]

On the matter UV's, all the walls are plain white, obviously at the moment the surface is a matt white, so would I need to make a white image to UV map? I must admit I feel a tad stupid when it comes to UV mapping, can't believe I 've managed to go ten years without using it :S

[andym323]

Time for a little update, I've been playing with the settings, as you do ;) Here are some test renders of the partially populated scene.

Got my render time per frame to between 3 and 6 minutes, which I'm not too upset with at all. I've not baked anything but the radiosity in these pics and I've left the GI, Camera and Render settings the same in all, just changing from FG to MC and adding and removing the rad sphere :)

Final Gather with sphere.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v244/andym323/TEST_FG_Dome.jpg

Monte Carlo with sphere.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v244/andym323/TEST_MC_Dome.jpg

FG, no sphere.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v244/andym323/TEST_FG_NoDome.jpg

MC, no sphere.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v244/andym323/TEST_MC_NoDome.jpg

The lights are:-

1x rad sphere @ 100%
1x distant light @ 25% for sun shadows
3x DP Floods for uplighters on left wall @ 50%, 16 samples and 5500K clear mercury
10x linear lights for fluorecents @ 75%, Linear falloff @ 3.75m, Quality 4
Ambient @ 0%

GI settings (same for all)
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v244/andym323/TEST_Settings.jpg

As you can see, it looks ok, but its all very flat. :(

I don't seem to be able to get decent shadows under the furniture or in the corners of the room, also, the two doors on the far wall open into two small rooms with no lighting, however, there seems to be an awful lot of light in there :S

Any comments?

Andy

[Sensei]

My advise: less indirect bounces (8?! I don't see anything in your scene to sacrifice such value), less rays (512?!), less minimum pixel spacing (interpolation done every 20 pixels?! it's way not accurate).. maximum pixel spacing 500? wow.. What is wrong with default settings that you're using such weird values?

[andym323]

lol, I guess thats where they all landed after I'd finished playing ;)

Okay, further to you advice, here's an MC version (slightly more populated) with the default GI settings...

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v244/andym323/TEST_MC_Default.jpg

FG version coming...

[andym323]

And the FG version...

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v244/andym323/TEST_FG_Default.jpg

Both these were done with 0% Ambient light

[andym323]

And here it is, the FG default version...

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v244/andym323/TEST_FG_Default.jpg

Both these have 0% ambient!

[andym323]

And now, same again, but with a maHOOsive area light....

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v244/andym323/TEST_FG_AREA100.jpg

[Mr Rid]

Ive never needed more than 36 rays, 2 bounces, and 2 recursions for reflections. Doesnt look like you need to refract anything. And keep ambient down for Zeus' sake.

[andym323]

:agree:

As we type, the populated, animated move across the office is rendering happily away ;)

65 of 100 done, 22h 13mins elapsed, 12h 15mins to go :D

Went with the settings I detailed above, and it looks quite nice, even if i do say so meself, I'll post it here when its done :D