I had read complaints about Bryce not doing radiosity effects and as I understand the idea, radiosity is the diffuse light that bounces off of objects, leaving its effect on other objects. I decided to try to fake this as easily and cheaply (in terms of time to construct it and the rendering time that the construct would use) as possible. I built this simple room you see in this diagram.

The basic idea was a room with a bright light bulb (radial light) in the center of the ceiling, with the light bouncing off the floor and four walls simulated by weaker radial lights placed behind the walls and under the floor approximately where the hottest spots from the "real" shadow-producing light would be. This would simulate the bounce of light with some accuracy. I left all the lights white, but I think you might get better accuracy by changing the color to match the floor or walls the light is faking. Here is a render with objects near one wall, near the corner. You can see some of the radiosity effect here, but the objects aren't picking up much of the diffuse light from behind, similar to what you might see in the real world under similar conditions.

In this render, the objects have been moved close to the center of the room. I'm not happy with the look of the nail, but this could probably be fixed with a change of its texture, or perhaps by "dimming" the lights a little. The porcelan horse is bleached out a bit here, too, but if you think of this as trying to simulate a photographic process, then the horse would probably wash out in the photo with this lighting. Still a little raw, but I think this could be refined to make a good "stage" to render still lifes and indoor scenes. What do you think?

A few things I forgot to mention. If you don't render at a setting of 64 or higher, the shadows are grainy. I have blurred reflections turned on in these pictures. The pics each took around 2 hrs. to render.

Well that was interesting, not to mentions all of these items look wonderful. Sharen

Attached Link: http://www.ict.usc.edu/~jcohen/lightgen/lightgen.html

That is real good information, thanks! There is another venue you can tinker with, there ia a plug-in for HDRShop called LightGen, you take a HDRI image and run the plug-in on it and it will create a text file with X,Y,Z coordinates of 20 or so points of light and their colors. (You can use 10 or even 30 or more) You take this information and create point lights at the specific coordinates, color them accordingly, and ta da! You can then use the HDRI image, converted to a JPG, as a reflection and/or environment map. Example file using the "Kitchen.HDR" image and 10 points for lights. Light0001: Color: 585.219 503.016 474.023 Direction: -0.117328 -0.0871853 0.989259 Light0002: Color: 277.733 239.911 201.376 Direction: -0.297418 -0.952537 -0.0649301 Light0003: Color: 485.126 411.573 368.069 Direction: 0.989031 -0.0936083 0.114262 Light0004: Color: 369.819 349.904 399.072 Direction: -0.53859 0.529147 -0.655686 Light0005: Color: 1892.71 2111.49 2298.06 Direction: -0.486254 -0.338903 -0.80542 Light0006: Color: 502.765 546.356 662.831 Direction: 0.310797 0.512217 -0.800649 Light0007: Color: 3111.94 4187.11 5226.72 Direction: 0.264254 -0.422419 -0.867025 Light0008: Color: 435.536 370.166 321.171 Direction: -0.991839 -0.0464208 0.118743 Light0009: Color: 1249.27 806.41 408.75 Direction: 0.429011 -0.826688 0.364055 Light0010: Color: 397.616 252.073 191.132 Direction: 0.202338 0.914285 0.350916 I have not tried this as yet, so it is just an idea to save rendering time and still get the lights and their colors according to a HDR image. If you give it a try, please post a WIP. I will get some time this weekend and give it a go then. TMG

Used same HDR image but with 5 light points and brighter color(light) Light0001: Color: 16128 14301 14733.2 Direction: 0.306604 -0.273226 0.911779 Light0002: Color: 21693.3 15162.8 9170.07 Direction: 0.505311 -0.840744 -0.194448 Light0003: Color: 15212.3 13964.8 14048.6 Direction: -0.874643 0.081576 0.477855 Light0004: Color: 40054 48283.7 56812.3 Direction: -0.0286202 -0.206325 -0.978065 Light0005: Color: 9697.83 6767.58 5757.49 Direction: 0.674216 0.736104 -0.0598713 I have been tinkering a bit with this, needs to be simplified some. Will keep tinkering with tis and your idea as well. Thanks for sharing your idea on this. :> TMG

The first image does look very natural. Thanks for sharing your ideas tjohn, I think I might try this out myself. Catlin

thanks for that link, it sounds like a great plugin. I've been trying to do something like that manually by rendering the inside of a sphere and then adjusting each light intensity and color individually. This sounds much less tedious.

You're welcome, :> Post some WIP's please, wouldn't mind seeing what becomes of this technique. TMG

The upper image looks much better than the lower one. In the lower one, look at the book spine - it appears to be lit from below. The book cover is wonderful, BTW. It may be a very lo-tech solution, but one can go some way towards faking radiosity just by tweaking the ambient material settings, so that objects are not dependent on diffuse light to show up.