Well, it's been 24 hours since I recieved C2... Heres what happened: I went home Ate some food Unpacked it from the box and ... he he just kidding :) But seriously, I have not been able to get a decent render using GI and caustics. My renders come nowhere near what is in the example images section of the CD.... The bad part is that the example scenes don't render the same way either.... maybe they didn't set the options appropirately. :( As for speed, well I am waiting to get home and see the results of a render that took all day. Hope it comes out good this time. It is a glass block wall in the middle of a fully closed room with one bulb light behind the wall and and all settings at high. Seems that this one is a pure system stresser no doubt. Everything I have generated so far with GI comes out with a very blurred and splotchy look and the caustics are not sharp enough to be recognized as caustics. Imagine the patterns on tkanes blocks on every object in a scene, even without caustics! Oh well, of course it is probably time for me to find the tutorials on the CD and see what happens..... Maybe I'll post what I have if it doesn't look tooo bad. :) Maybe some of the more knowledgeable C2 gods (litst, etc) could help ........ {:n) .Painter

When doing GI renders it's best if you reduce your light setting to less than 100 ,try 50, 60. Spotlight are the fasters to render. Also if you have glass stuff it it very important that you have a proper glass texture or the objects will have this white hot spots that glow. The sum of the Transp, Color and reflection should be equal to 100 if it is over 100 it will have really HOT white spots. In the render room use photons 100,000 and 40%. Let me know if this helps you. Ringo

Hello, Here's a little explaination of how to get good results and fair render times with the Global Illumination engine :) I hope it helps, litst

Here's my first big issue. I want to use the lighting from a glowing object but I can't get it to light up much of an area. I want to light entire scenes! Still digging through stuff though. Haven't looked at the CD's closely yet. -Kix

Here's some comparison using regular light though. This is C1.

Here's C2 with GI. The differences are trivial for this particular image.

Ok, Here's an image with a hemisphere as a glow object. This uses GI strictly.

And here is an image in C1 using Environmental lighting withe the same hemisphere for the source.

I've figured out how to increase the lighting radius (obviously). Conclusions. From the test renders I've done and the stuff that's on the CD, I would conclude that the GI is valuable for scenes which have multiple glow sources or more universal lighting schemes. The focused light I've used on the sword has VERY impressive lighting behavior but I simply need more glowing lights or at least larger ones (like a tube light). Reflexively, I think we need some more control over things. The sky dome stuff that I've seen appears to be somewhat overbearing. The rendering cost isn't as prohibitive as I would have imagined. The GI source glow image above was 90 minutes with GI jacked up FULL. Not bad. -Kix

The skylight can be adjusted but also remember that if you have a dark blue sky your scene will be lite with that darkblue or what ever color you have for the sky or background.Use a combo of lights a low setting in the skylight and maybe a bulb or infinite light. A bit of practice will get you a great render. For glowing objects use the Multiply in the shader and use the new "Scale" slider and not the "value" slider.This will give you much brighter lights Ringo

As Ringo said, when using a background or a sky atmosphere for a GI skydome, you MUST set the intensity . Indeed, it's zero by default, so you won't see much more than a big slowdown in your rendering . On this render, the skydome is at 150 and the light at 25 . There will be a lot of issues concerning the new engine . It always take time to maste a technology . Hey Ringo, remember the dumb questions we had some time ago ? ;) litst

Boy, I sure do remember. ;-) If I may compare the C2 workflow setting to C4DXL7 I can tell you that in C2 you get GI/Radiosity images render setup and render much faster than in C4DXL7. :-) Ringo

There are some rules you got to follow in CS2 . More about this when the problems come out ;) Kix, maybe it would be a good idea to gather all the tricks in a FAQ ? litst

I found the scale thingamathing by opening some of the scenes on the CD and studying the glow channel. I'm VERY glad those are included! Good idea litst. I'm going to wait for things to cook a little more and do some more experimenting. So far, GI has it's pros and cons. We've just got to learn how to tweak it. I don't think it's going to be the savior for ALL lighting that I might had percieved it as but it does do some cool stuff without sending my machine into oblivion. -Kix

I have been rendering tests like crazy and I am learning.... Thanks for all the help. I will post something as I get better!

Here's a more impressive result of GI. When I rendered this originally in RD (you can go and see it in my gallery), the result was similar but I had to use four extra lights to fake the radiosity. This new comparison image shows what it would look like with just the raytracer and no additional radiosity fakeups and with the exact same thing using GI. Very impressive. 15 Minutes Render time using defaults. -Kix

Kix, Awesome render and models. Did you make them yourself? If so, is there a tutorial on making such impressive models? Thanks, and keep up the great work! Chris

I did make the models myself. Sorry about no tutorial on this. I'm already treading thin ice using Star Wars stuff without permission from Lucas. Doing final renders and presnting them is one thing. Showing people how to do it is another. I've pursued the copyright issue down several paths and I decided to draw the line there. It's a bummer because I know tons of people are interested. -Kix