You know, I'm having trouble with all this radiosity stuff. I mean, what are you all trying to achieve? OK so all the examples are pretty stunning and you've obviously put a lot of hard work into them but what do they give you that you can't get with the atmosphere and spotlights provided for in Bryce? Now I don't believe I'm stupid but whatever it is you are working towards is running away from me. I'm being left behind in a debate I can't get a handle on. If it's just about reflections and their source images what is all the fuss about? Please understand that I'm not ridiculing anyone or belittling any of the work.....I'm simply curious. Regards The Bryster

First radiosity, HDRI, Global illumination, etc are all different things and aspects of lighting. Regular Bryce settings doesn't bounce light off of objects. Once a light ray hits an object it stops. This isn't how real light works. All surfaces (except maybe flat black) reflects some light back into a scene picking up some of the color it reflected off. This basically is radiosity. True ambience seems to come close in some situations. Global illumination is a part of radiosity as that light isn't coming from one source. An object is lit by the main light source and the light rays bouncing off of all the objects surrounding it. HDRI is getting the smae effect without having to use any lights especially a light dome which will increase render times. It does this buy reflecting the surrounding image on the object. The only place you really get hard light is from the sun on a bright day. There are some soft shadows outside if the object is tall enough and transmits it's shadow far enough along the ground. Even then you get diffuse light from the surrounding sky. Same thing happens indoors except you get more soft shadows. Basically to light a scene so that light comes from different directions requires you to use multiple lights and manually place them so they match what you want. The techniques descibed above are a way to achieve the same thing with less steps and in a lot of cases less render time and more realistic lighting environment.

Well said!

I think it's technical work, in this case mostly to compare Bryce functions to that of Lightwave, 3DS, etc. I love the soft shadow effects that multiple lights create, but reflection mapping is just laziness to me. (shrugs)

It's all about realism.

Alderon: Many thanks! That puts the whole thing in a nutshell for me and no mistake! I think now I'm beginning to understand and wish you all the best of luck....cos I don't think I'll be tackling this anytime soon. Thanks again.... The Bryster

Well, It's like anything else ShadowDragonLord, you can make things the easy way, or put more work into it and the results will show. Just to let you know, for the last 3 days I have done nothing but Bryce HDR work for 12+ hours a day. Ask Agent if you don't believe me. Ive pestered him plenty.(I'm disabled so Im home all day, thats why my typing is so bad :) So who is the lazy one? The ones that look for more realistic lighting, or the ones who just use whats there? Im not coming down on you, don't get me wrong, but if we just accept how things are, things will never improve or get better. When HDR, Radiosity, and true lighting are done correctly the results are outstanding. Go to Lightwaves website , newtek.com and look at there gallery. That is what Global illumination and radiosity can do for you.Or go to splutterfish and look at those renderings. Again, that realism is acheived with what we are attempting to do. If that doesn't float your boat and your happy slapping a few poser figures into a poorly lit scene, then by all means. But if your like me, and Im happy to see that a few are, and your biggest thing is realism, then you should look outside the box. Im sure when Corel was working on Bryce 5 they never intended for people to be using lightdomes or "tricking" the render engine into doing pseudo radiosity. Im not upset, but it does bother me to see a person make a comment about laziness when they don't have all the facts or can't appreciate the work some people put in to bring these "lazy" features or ideas. .. Stepping of the soapbox now.

Hey no problem Bryster. To put it simply I guess we are trying to do ina $300 program what can be achieved in the $1000-$2000 programs. A challenge to prove Bryce is just as good as the others for less price. BTW shadowdragonlord, you seem to always be bringing up how lazy something is. I noticed you use LW, when animating do you use the gravity, deflection etc features? If so maybe that's doing it the lazy way. Just because something is easier to achieve one way doesn't make it lazy. Hell the ultimate lazy is just rendering a photo onto a 2D face.

Here's the deal. Lighting is The single most important aspect in cg. Hence why sometimes a few spheres can look better than a bryce generated wilderness. Believe it or not everything you see irl is just light reflecting off of an object. Hence when you turn the lights off... Where does it all go? It's still there right? Just like the 3d models are without lighting... HDRI requires more work than allowing bryce to render a default sky as a reflection map. Do you want us to build entire scenes behind the objects? If so, you are insane, the poly count would destroy render times. There is more to rendering than just making it as unbelievably complex as possible. I enjoy provoking realism through bryce, I think it is a "challenge" as it is pretty much the only software I can afford. Sure if I had a couple grand to smack down on lw maya or 3dsm I would, but as the old saying goes, if bryce gives you lemons...Make lemonade.

i kno that to make a scene realistic, u can't just use the default sun settings, but is there really any way to tell wut to use/how much lighting effects for a particular setting? some kind of formula? i kno that AS is makin a tut for radiosity, but can anyone/is it possible to make a tut on how to achieve realism using those elements? tell me if i've got anything wrong, but i've only really known about these things for a few days(since there started to be bout 6 posts a day about radiosity in this forum).

Antevark, I feel your pain brother(or sister :) What I have learned in 6 years of 3D is there is never a "formula" Its 10% technic and 90% mickey mouse. In other words, there is no set sure fire way to get realism. There are too many variables when making your own scene that any technic could cover. Yes we can use things people here share as was to get a certain color, light and so forth but it all depends on what that scene needs and what you want it to express. Myself, personally when I do a scene <-- For some reason I think Im spelling that wrong ? Anyway, when I do an image I go for realism. I used to get harassed to no end by my High School Art teacher years ago becuase he was of the belief that art was expression, not mimicing the real world. For some, maybe, but not for me. To me true art is the ability of the art to make the viewer believewhat he is looking at is real. The idea or story behind the picture is icing on the cake. Of course, that's all my humble opinion and you can do with it what you will.

I may be nit-picking here but as I understand it, Ray tracing (i.e. Bryce) is actually inverted from the real world because it shoots rays from the camera instead of receiving them. True Radiosity is a "real world" rendering technique where a scene is pre-calculated for all light rays (including bounces), with no reference to a camera. This pre-render can take hours but once done the camera can be placed anywhere in the scene and takes only minutes to render (and includes bounce data and data that is "off" camera). A lot of what people think of as Radiosity is just a radiosity subset or hybrid RT/Radiosity. Some of what Ornlu has been trying to recreate in the recent threads is Color Bleeding; the ability of a mirror to reflect light back into a room is called Caustics (Bryce has always had Refractive Caustics, btw); surrounding a scene with a sphere (for reflections) is called Image Based Lighting (IBL) and HDRI output uses floating point numbers to store color values rather the usual 0-255 integers used in the RGB model. Most often used with IBL. Of course, I'm just an amateur and any corrections would be appreciated (VBG). HTH- Dan

Aye, JDW I meant no disrespect at ALL, on your part. I appreciate the steps and the techniques for which you are working so hard at! I can't wait to see your next images, for certain. But to answer YOU, Ornlu. YES. Build the entire scene. Pull up the big-boy-pants and just build a scene! The reflection maps we are playing with aren't even very complex scenes, and we've all seen masterpieces of architecture and indoor scenes done in Bryce. And thanks, Dan Whiteside, for clearing up the terminology about these topics. I'll shut up about it from now on! (grins) May you all find water and shade...

I say do what makes you happy. Faking Radiosity makes me happy :> Gotta love it! @Shadowdragonlord - could you make a scene and post it here so I can see what you are talking about visually, I am curious and am wondering how much of a difference it would make compared to the HDRI method discussed here ~ Thanks! TMG

I do art to show weird emotions i am having to other people. Sometimes I want abstract, but currently my fetish is on realism. I've never been much for still life type scenes, but I try to get more real life everyday lighting scenes set up. For example, flourescent lighting, skylights, bright sunny day, etc. HDRI, radiosity, and global illumination all help me to fullfill my creative need more quickly. Usually I try to make the HDRI's myself or edit them before I use them...mostly just because I don't like most of the one's available to me. Just another tool in the toolbelt i guess :)

Yeah I've made a few, but I don't have a digital camera, so I have to take all the pictures and send them to kodak to get a photoCD then work off that. I need to get a digital camera and a fisheye lense instead of this lightprobe. Anyway Dan whiteside, What you're talking about is called surface baking, this is different than radiosity. Surface baking is basically painting the light into the textures after calculating it once. Bryce doesn't support this and infact doesn't even support radiosity. All radiosity/hdri/gi we are doing is faked completely.

Bryster, what the radiosity/hdri stuff is going on could probably have been one in B3 or below. Had that been figured out back then, Bryce would have been in the theatres instead of Maya and SI and EIU. This is artist cutting edge stuff. The programmers built it, the marketeers sold it, and for a rare treat, we have learned once again that the product is underrated. Bryce never ceases to amaze me.

Attached Link: http://www-viz.tamu.edu/students/softviz/viza617/presentation/radiosity.html

"Anyway Dan whiteside, What you're talking about is called surface baking, this is different than radiosity." Guess it could be a matter of interpertation but I did a Google search for Radiosity and they seem to agree with my definition - here's the above site's definition: "The computation of lighting via radiosity is unlike many traditional computer graphics lighting computation because it is view independent. The intensity of surfaces in the model are computed before any view calculations are made. Instead of computing the lighting as the last step in the traditional rendering process, radiosity is done beforehand. Certain surfaces in the scene are given initial intensities, and the effect they have on other surfaces in the scene is computed in an iterative manner. This is done independently of the location of the viewer." This is the way Radiosity works in my modeler (FormZ). Best - Dan

Well I'm just gobsmacked at the response to this question! I could chew on this stuff for a year! I want to thank each and every one of you for putting things straight for me. I guess that I will never get to the high standards some of you have achieved but I'm not a quitter and Bryce will be my thing for a long time to come. thanks once again, yall! The Bryster