Okay. I'n not 100% sure about this, but I have tried it with comparable results. Basically a lot of people nowadays are starting to use radiosity domes or semi-domes, in the hopes that it will make their renders more realistic. That is fine. Unfortunately, faked radiosity Bryce renders take forever to finish. And the reason for that is the because the processor has to take into consideration the shadows set by each one of the 100+ lights often used.

So at one point, I said, well, wtf (I do say wtf out loud sometimes). it's only shadows. the only thing that is good is the self-shadows objects create on themselves, because it ads to realism, and the idea that light bounces off objects. because of excrutiangly painful, ornluian render times, with more than 115 light domes, most ppl still use the 115-120 model, and in most cases, the shadows on the ground left by the object are bad. you can actually see how every light leaves a separate shadow, and unless you're really good with PS, you can't blur those correctly (btw, idea 2 in regards to that below). SO:

1. If you're going to use a semi-dome, a little 3-5 reflection of the object's materials, especially if there is fine bump, is going to come off as shadow blur (with the shadows off).

2. a single spotlight, placed in the geographic center of the semidome, will cause the same general shadow as the entire semidome. so with reflections and what not, you're basically having light bouncing off in faked radiosity, and a half-butted, two-timing, 80% accurate shadow of radiosity, but with a single spotlight. as you can see from the example above, the render time is also more than halved. it can be done, especially if you match the shadows correctly. in the example above i didn't use the exact same lighting properties b/w the radiosity dome and the one spotlight. but you can actually see the difference.

3. if you really want to use faked radiosity, and keep the shadows, render the whole thing, do a mask of the object, and provided a little common sense, blur the ground shadows separately, only to paste the object again over the entire deal. it WILL change the look of the image.

makes sense? yes? no? **Most importantly, it will make the render take much less time than before.**what do you guys think?

drac

Message edited on: 05/21/2004 23:48

115 radial light dome: Intenstiy: 1 color 35-35-35 No falloff cast shadows 0-0 (not enough sys resources with soft shadows enabled)

Sky sun/moon visible 100-100
Sun moon shadows 90 soft shadows disabled
sky dome 0-0-0 ambient 225-225-225
Sun color 225-225-225
Disabled sun light no fog/haze/clouds
The room is 100 diffusion default color 19.6 ambience

So what your saying is to add a spotlight in the center to get rid of these patterns as pointed out in the image?

What's 'squared' mean with regard to the radial in this case?

yeah that's what i'm talking about, the fact that you can see 100 shadows for every object

ddm, it's the light setting in the light lab. basically the way it falls on the object.

Sooooooo how do we get rid of it?

Oh you mean 'FALLOFF'?

you disable the shadows from all the semidome lights and create another radial light with soft shadows and whatever falloff -thanks smartass- best fits the scene. drac

Smart *$$? What do you mean? I live but to serve you...

Thanks drac.

pets miller there there drac

Yup, you got it drac. There's so many various ways of doing stuff like this. *When needed, I will; render my scene without any shadows. render the scene again, but with the objects and ground all covered with a white mat, and non-soft shadows turned on for one light. *This gives me a "shadow map" render, (or whatever it might be called). With some tweaking I can blur it (making soft shadows), and re-apply it over my main render in a 2D editor. That's oversimplification, but you get the idea (hopefully) There's lots of varients to this "technique", and I learned about it by reading high-end tutorials, they use cheats like this ALL the time. AgentSmith

Attached Link: "Retail Bryce" picture

I added most of my soft shadows in, in post-work, rendering the shadows seperate from the main render. I did this beacuse, soft shadows take forever to render, and I wanted to keep the natural soft shadow line that was falling off the LDRI. (If I were to turn on the soft shadows, that line completely dissapeared). So I rendered the scene with no soft shadows, and the sun as the only source of light. most objects had their "cast shadows" turned off. I then made 3 different renders of shadows and added them to the main render in Photoshop. AgentSmith

"Ogres (and impressive renders) are like onions." - Shrek

Aye, there's lots of cool techniques to keep the render times down! A couple of things : 1. A light dome is in no way linked to Radiosity, Drac. You know this! What we are talking about is softer shadows. Radiosity effects in Bryce require the True Ambience settings, or you can fake it with Blurry Reflections a bit... 2. I can't remember what the second one was! Nothing really makes up for patience and Bryce's soft shadows setting. I really do think your second example is the best looking, Drac... Oh yeah, the second thing was in regards to Captor's image with the guns. You could eliminate all of those shadow-artifacts by just using Soft Shadows on ONE light. Set that light to Squared fallof, and you're set...

Agent Smith, Thanks, that was very helpful. And its the answer to having the a floor thats so dark it ruins the bottom lighting on objects because they reflect back darkness. Those scenes can also be done as two scenes, and then layered together. I think. lol