Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=746826&Start=1&Artist=Tugmaster&ByArtist=Yes

was browsing through the c4d gallery and came upon this piece. check out his explanation of how he did it: "I used a lightdome with 45 lights and a slightly smaller dome inside that with a hdr image for reflections only and then one omni light for shadows. " just one omni light for shadows. and that's it. i think we were talking about this a long time ago, and it seems like the most decent thing to do, really. make a light dome or semidome, increase the reflectivity of the objects a notch, disable the shadows, and just have one light source. if the settings are set correctly, not only will it render faster, but you won't experience shadow banding and the result will be much more realistic. drac

• have one shadow source rather

I'm really confused :( wouldn't the inner dome cut out the light dome totally? or do I miss some subtle trick that even a newbie could understand?

no, no, you're right :) but that's c4d. in bryce you'd just make the sphere larger and apply a panoramic texture of some sort :)

Lucifer, In Cinema, the lights go through stuff by default, even solid walls. Something that pissed me of for quite a while, until i got it explained. :) Thanx for the link Drac. Might be useful.

phew :) thought I was losing it for a while there :)

@ Drac

Hmm, doing this for some time, got tired of rendering 36 or more lights with shadows on (expecially soft ones) ! :)

I also add some gradient to the light rig as well....

I tought this was well known tehnique :)

Never combined it with HDRI sphere, but looks like a nice combo !!! :)

Thanks for the info, Drac :)

Check this link out (this is where I got some Ideas about it)

CLICK ME :)

BTW, I liked your Wings tutorial, just got trough it the other day, it will be very useful in my modeling poligonal objects in C4D, cuz I do only nurbs for now (wings is more simple too) !!! :)

thanks kemal i really need to update that though. i did that tut when i was a newbie at the program drac

my method is: a dome with material light 99 % transparent with map in diffuse channel (fake hdri) blurred reflection true ambience lights: 0 materials: diffuse + ambience + reflection: 100%

My method is a booleaned sphere (has to be booleaned.) with a HDRI map on it, then take lights and group them up against the inside of the sphere where the 'light' would come from, IE if there's a window, I arrange the lights by the window, as well as any other light sources. Then either just stop there, or apply a semi- sphere of non shadow casting lights set to extremely low values and varying colors depending on the HDRI. I have found that this is the best way (that I've experienced atleast) to simulate GI.

I have never tried the light dome thing or even attempted fake a HDRI, maybe its time to see what I can pull out of my ......... Thanks for the llinks.

This was created using the method I mentioned above. 1 shadow casting light where the sun is on the hdri, then a 1/4 dome of non shadow casting lights with a slight blue tings although some were white, to give the gradiant shadow effect. A few other non shadow casting lights were also placed around the other areas of the scene to give that TINY hint of light into areas that would be completely black with shadows.

I've been doing my HDRI scenes with a single light since i started playing around. I've just always put a single light way up at the top of the sphere with intensity 1 and no falloff. It never looked very good.

ORNLU...BRILLIANT!!!!! EXCELLENT WORK QUESTION? SUN IS ON? TRUE AMBIENCE ? ONLY 1 LIGHT CAST SHADOWS? THANK YOU

Lucifer- I think this would work ok in Bryce if the inner sphere has cast, self and receive shadows off in its material. In cinema you could have the dome's lights set to not cast shadows but this could lead to errors as Rochr has noted so it has to be used carefully. A compositing tag appled to the sphere to turn off the cast/receive shadows as with my suggestion above would probably be a better solution though.

Lucifer, Draculaz....what next? I think this place is getting to be the dark side.......

Look up incarnadine (grin)

So you're blood-red/flesh-coloured........?

Message edited on: 08/24/2004 19:25

Crazy british spelling of color.

@Thuleke: No the sun is off. I said, that I put the one shadow casting light where the sun is on the HDRI map. which is mapped on the inside of a sphere. I'm thinking of putting together a few of my HDRI/GI/faked radiosity scenes together (about 5-6) and putting them up in the store or freestuff. Since this seems to be an ever present question.

Message edited on: 08/24/2004 19:26

just another wonderful name from the dark side. (Although it does have some relevance given parts of my art background (pen and ink illustration days))

@Ornlu - yup, that's the correct spelling, crazy isn't it! (grin)

If you'll notice, the rifle pic had two shadows. I just left a comment asking Tugmaster why was that.

Attached Link: http://tengaal.art.chez.tiscali.fr/Pages/Astuces/Eclairage/hdri2.htm

I'm toying with the dangerous idea of trying out Ornlu's technique... Someone (maybe Ornlu?) posted this bookmark awhile ago, panoramic images that's be useful.

Any chance of a step-by-step, Ornlu? I know it seems obvious to you, but I can never quite figure out how to turn out all the lights to start with a clean slate. It'd be useful to have a 'no-lights-at-all' scene in my Bryce folder to save a step. oops, re-read your first post Ornlu and see that you explain it all. The booleaned sphere would make turning off the sun etc. irrelevant.......?

Message edited on: 08/25/2004 02:02

Well yes and no, go into the sky lab, and first off, use a BLACK background, it's a preset. then turn off the sun in the same control area. Also, turn off fog/haze, which I'm pretty sure is off by default in that black preset. If you don't use these settings you'll get some pretty weird looking renders (bryce doesn't like anything but the black sky for renders like these ( I have no idea why )) The booleaned sphere reduces the amount of noise in reflective/transparent mats in the scene for some reason. It has to do with bryce's inherent back faced culling or whatever it's called. But basically, you want it on the positive side of the polygons.

Also, if you want to use some of those jpegs and don't need a perfect reflection, or are doing a close up image that would have blurred reflections of distant objects, then take them into photoshop. Change the image size to 4.. to 6 times its original size, then blur the hell out of it using gaussian blur. You can also add hot spots at this point where you will be 'relatively' placing the lights on the inside of the sphere. When you place it in bryce, use it as a 100% ambient materia on the booleaned sphere.

Great explanation, all cut&pasted into wordpad. Will try it out later today when I've time. hmmnnn....wondering what you mean by "But basically, you want it on the positive side of the polygons. "?? What's 'it'?

One thing about using presets other than the basic is that soft shadows from the premium settings has trouble with some of them. So if you want to use soft on the main light keep this in mind. Other than that this seems a great technique!

The big limitation for Tugmaster's technique (and similar) is that there aren't always dark shadows where there should be. That's the result of using non-shadow casting lights. The 'underside' of surfaces can go dark, but any nearby surfaces of an 'upward' persuasion are brightly lit. Check out the base of the spotting scope where it mounts to the tripod. At least parts of those vertical surfaces should be as dark as the underside of the scope tube. The insides of the ear mufflers are bright, even right under the lip of the surround. The base of the rifle bipod goes dark almost to black - there is no corresponding shadow area on the table. And as a technique for simulating radiosity it fails, of course, because there is absolutely no diffuse reflection/illumination between surfaces. I think that lighting method is fine for displaying models clearly (such as the excellent ones in that pic), but it doesn't succeed in achieving realism. A note about 'GI' or Global Illumination. None of these light dome techniques can come anywhere near close to simulating it: "Global illumination is a superset of radiosity and ray tracing. The goal is to compute all possible light interactions in a given scene, and thus obtain a truely photorealistic image. All combinations of diffuse and specular reflections and transmissions must be accounted for. Effects such as colour bleeding and caustics must be included in a global illumination simulation." http://graphics.ucsd.edu/~henrik/images/global.html Global Illumination simulations require everything to be simulated. 'GI' has nothing to do with globes or spheres.