Tutorial 1: Global Illumination

We are still waiting (and/or hoping) that the developers of Blender will beef up the render engine and add ray tracing. But until then, I have decided to take a break from the Falcon in order to see if I could get Blender to achieve the popular effect of Global Illumination.

I am happy to say that Blender has great potential in this area. Below are two pictures I did with Blender to simulate Gloabal Illumination. Below the pictures, you will see how I did them. It is actually very simple. There are two things I would like the developers of Blender to consider in improving radiosity: (1) Radiosity would be much better if it could calculate ultra-detail (tiny) meshes AND (2) to allow for mesh smoothing. I made the column models with a bunch of faces to see if Blender could handle it. If you look at the picture of the columns you can tell Blender could not solve it very well. However,when you render with OSA 16 things smooth out nicely.

 

 

Here is how to do it:

The screen shot below shows you the layout and radiosity settings. Don't make the icosphere too big or you may get fake shadows on some models. When you render the solved image, set OSA to 16 (this does wonders).

1) For your model materials, it really doesn't matter too much (I did the Falcon below with no materials at all!) These are the settings I used for the floor, and I use the same settings for all the models. You can make the floor or model any color you want.

2) For the Icosphere here are the emitter settings. You can also change the emitter color if you want.

3) Make sure your meshes (all of them, including the emitters) are NOT doublesided.

4) Make sure the normals are all correct on your meshes. Obviously, the emitters should point inward and the model outward.

5) Note: you don't have to let radiosity solve completely. I stop anywhere from 150-500. That's It!

Here is another picture just for the fun of it. Since there is so much tiny detail, radiosity did not calculate it that well, but still it's pretty cool. This is ALL Blender!

For questions or comments you can e-mail me at: swilkinson@stny.rr.com

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