I thought I was starting to get it. I still don't get it, infact in the last five minutes I've gotten even more confused.

Here's my try at trueish ambience. Almost works, you can see the ball color on her skin and visa-versa.

Only 16 rpp, thats why it's so grainy. For those who've never used the TA setting before, the higher the Rays Per Pixel, the less grain. I couldn't figure out what the big deal was since the pictures posted always looked like crap. It's because every extra ray bryce has to trace adds another factor to the render time. And since most of this is still in the experimenting stage, speed beats quality. ***** I didn't mean to say that ANY picture looks like crap. It's just that pics demonstrating true ambience have an amount of grain in them. I didn't (still really don't, but its fun to play with) see the point in giving up a clean render for true ambience. I have been VERY impressed with some of the examples I've seen. *****

Message edited on: 08/28/2004 22:41

Butthead: uh huh huh huh "ball color"

It's supposed to create an ambient effect. heh [rubbing forehead] WHAT part are you lost on?

Not your fault but the low Rpp makes that look horrifying.. and dead like..

22 minutes down 4 estimated hours to go.

If you render TA and to a huge a res, then drop back down in Pshop afterwards you get the faked radiosity and less grain......

Sorry to drag this one out again, but it does show that rendering large and reducing will hide the grain a lot. This was actually quite a low rpp setting (and was still an 'overnight' render time). In fact, I think the method can provide some photorealism to 3D pics by adding in a bit of softness and 'film grain'. The pic also shows that careful composition and not getting too close to mesh models can hide the mesh facetting under True Ambience successfully enough to use the process for making images using 'Poser' figures.

Xenic101, here is an attempt to faking ambience - I followed the suggestions by Thuleke: 1 dome with hdri True ambience 1 light cast shadows 256 rpp As you can see, TA avoid that the shadows are too much dark - and there is no grain. Of course, at that high rpp the render took about 22 hrs on an Athlon 2500 XP with 512 DDR 400... :P