Hi, while reading a book about rendering and radiosity, I thought about how nice it would be, if Vue d'Esprit had radiosity-rendering. "Ok, Ok - that's a bit much to ask for a programm of this price!" you may say, but think a moment about this: I will the next two messages will show you two pictures. Both have exactly the same atmospheric settings -yet they are different. Please take a look...

While this is still very crude, it may show you, what I intended to do: In the second picture, I used a "lightdome" a dome of 164 point-lights, coloured according to their position inside the skyfield.. While this is still very crude and positions are not correctly set at the moment, picture number 02 shows a distinct atmospheric lightning. Now for the question. I used a geodesic dome, split apart into its 164 faces. I exported this dome into Vue d'Esprit via Wavefront Object and ungrouped the object inside Vue d'Esprit. I simple used the parts-list to mark every object, setting a point-light into the center of every face until I had a dome of 164 point-lights. These pointlights were crudely coloured to fit the colour of their background in the skydome - very crudely to be true. None of these pointlights does cast a shadow or is volumetric or has a lens-flare. This is supposed to simulate the global lightning effect of radiosity. Now for you programmers at E-On-Software or anyone who is capable to do such a thing: Is it possible to create a "lightdome" object for Vue d'Esprit? This lightdome needs to have the following qualities: The density and amount of lights need to be variable. The lights must automatically take the colour of their background of the skydome. The lights need to decrease and increase their strength with their position relative to the sund. Those closer to the sun need to be stronger than those opposed to the sun. On a lightdome with a diameter of 3000 Vue-Units, lightstrength should vary between 5 for the off-side to about 50 on the sun-side. Thats it... just a mad idea, but it may just be possible, to give vue at least a tiny glimpse of radiosity even if full radiosity is still far away. Maybe it would be possible to create a plugin, that adds a small source of light to every glowing object. This source should not cast shadow and its strength should be set by the amount of luminosity and glow of the glowing object. This would further enhance the pseudo-radiosity-feeling. Oh, and by the way: Does anyone know, if there is a kind of "Vue d'Esprit"-SDK available? Joerg Weber

Hi Joerg, A great LightWave coder actually used a similar trick a while ago and created a plugin that fakes radiosity with a set of lights along with motion blur. I don't use it since I have radiosity in LW but it works great for older versions that didn't have radiosity and Global illumination. I would love to see such a thing for Vue in some form of plugin. :) Cheers!

Just out of curiosity Joerg, how much memory does the light array take up??

Actually rendertime was not much higher at all - I lost 15 seconds on a render of 1.38 minutes for the lightdome. Since the lights do not cast shadows, have no lensflare and no volumetrics, their memory-footprint is neligible. Just remember: This is far from real radiosity - it is just a kind of simulated radiosity with global lightning. Have fun, Joerg

That's quite intriguing there Joerg, and it sounds rather ambitious. I have my default new scene set up with 20 non-shadow lights, but that's a far cry from what you have done here. I don't understand what you mean when you say, "The lights must automatically take the colour of their background of the skydome." Do you mean, for example, that if a part of the skydome is near trees, the lights in that region should be greens? It would be very cool for E-on or someone to bring us even just a little closer to radiosity, but your method seems like it would work, and it's especially good that all those lights would not add significantly to the render time. Is this the same idea behind "real" radiosity?. I'm going to have to try this out! Thanks much, this could be VERY useful!

Ah, I was very unspecific about the colours. Imagine a line, going out from your world-coordinate-zero-point to an imaginary skydome. The light will be placed on that line, let's say, 3000 Vue-Units away from the viewer. The light must have exactly the colour and luminosity of the point, where the line hits the skydome. I am no programmer and cannot express my thoughts in a programmer-like way, but thats what I tried to create with the "Lightdome". This way, a kind of global lightning is established. Along with weak lightsources inside objects and stronger-lightsources inside glowing objects, a good simulation with a minimal memory-footprint is possible. Trees pose a problem: Leaves are transparent to a certain degree and will give a greenish colour tint to the light underneath. I haven't found a way to correctly simulate this effect. Maybe you could use several spots, aligned with the sunlight, having a slightly greenish tint. On the other hand, simply changing the material of the leaves may be enough to do the job. Joerg

I feel that pic #2 lacks the color reflected from behind the objects - color of the light that carries the warmer hues that would be present reflected from the ground. Am I missing something here? The objects seem to float or not belong quite to the scene. Could this be adjusted? Would that be desirable? Riv

Like I said: This was just a crude test for what I wanted to achieve. True radiosity is impossible with Vue at the moment. Joerg

Perhaps currently impossible in Vue itself, but this is an extremely cretive approach to it, Joerg!

Oh, sorry about my comment - did not mean to sound critical.... Best, Riv

Uhm... Sorry if my answer sounded aggressive - I didn't mean to sound aggressive and - no offense taken - criticism is welcome. At the moment I am trying to get a better result, but Vue is keeping to frustrate me. On your remark about the ground, I tried to get the ground to only slightly reflective to give me a better effect: Even setting reflectiveness only to 1% results in an enormous amount of reflection - Vue seems to be a bit overreactive when it comes to its settings on reflectiveness or transparency. quite a bit frustrating... Joerg

Oh wow! 1%! Thats what I had in mind too, just the smallest bit of reflection as in life - kinda ties it down to the ground - or whatever it sits near. Thanks for the continued experiments. You are way ahead of me. Riv

Maybe we can speed things a bit up. I will post the light-dome to freestuff on monday. Maybe if we all experiment a bit, things will speed up a lot. Joerg