"IBL? Ambient Occlusion?"

IBL could be done in P5 (whith much more effort), but Ambient Occlusion really couldn't be reproduced in the same way. You were able to "fake" AO with tons of spotlights, but it never came out quite as good in the end.

I'd suggest trying out the AO/IBL thing first (I know you're dying to hehe), but then don't overlook all the other goodies. I'm a big fan of the "shadow only" render pass that's now available, and the "specular only" and "diffuse only" light options (accessable on the light in the material room).

I'm sure you'll also enjoy the spot render option (render just tiny pieces of your render to preview), and of course the ability to go back and view your previous renders in the render cache. YOu can also save textures and shadow maps to a cache, so that after they load once (say for a test render), they don't need to keep loading over again for subsequent test renders. So many nice things, I'm sure you'll have some fun.

Just don't try huge scenes right off the bat or you'll get frustrated with the memory issue CL is working on. Message edited on: 03/31/2005 07:28

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Tools :  3dsmax 2015, Daz Studio 4.6, PoserPro 2012, Blender v2.74

System: Pentium QuadCore i7, under Win 8, GeForce GTX 780 / 2GB GPU.