this was a test render shot from my short im making and i used radiosty to see well how it works and it came out pretty stranged but i like the results

these were the settings used

photons cast: 60000
sample area: 800
photons samples: 500
intensity: 100%
max bounce: 50
16 passes

tell me what you guys think

Well Jason, what cha got there is a wonderful mess of nois. lol Were you trying to attain the look of real radiosity or were you going for that styelized blotchy look? I dont think you're going to need such a high photon sample for your model, plus it would add quite a long time to your renders. Make sure you make samples above 100, i usually do 200, and jittering to at least 20%. Those are the settings i've always had the best (look/render time) ratio. Bounces shouldnt be higher than 15 unless you have a supper long winding hallway and you want to see the slightest incling of light only detectable with the best night vision gogles. lol. Also be sure to use the radiosity calculator to find the best sample area for your project.

Did you model the outside or is it a picture?

Hope to see what you do with your renders.

yeah i was going to try for that realistic kind of look but instead got more of a artistic kind of look, eh whatever works
this was really kind of first time playing around with it
ill try those settings and see what it does
as for render times it really didnt take that long to render i say 40 mins total which isnt bad at all compared to some of the render times you guys get
as for the outside, im not that good to model all that so its just a picture pasted onto cardboard hehehe
also the walls have no texture on them just plain white walls

here was another render i did with the same settings
at least i can say i made these models but i defeintly did not like the way it came out
so ill try to rerender it with what you told me

I've always found that the majority of my long render times come from reflections, especialy if there is a normal or bump map involved. I had a katana that i made that took about 1:30 to render, but when i took it away it only took about an hour to render the empty room.

ok i tried to render with the settings you told me
render time took like 6x as long almost 4 hours
and now i got these weird specs all over the walls what did i do wrong?

Hmm... Very strange. It should be as bright in that area as the noisy render. Did you turn down the photon samples to 100? Here's the settings i use almost every time.

Photons Cast: 100,000
Sample Area: (Use the radiosity calculator in the radiosity tutorial)
Photon Samples: 100
Intensity: 100%
Max Bounces: 15
Caustics: OFF
Samples: 200
Jittering: 20%
Precomputering Irradiance: OFF (This one may have caused your new dot noise)

If you dont have the sample area calculator use this simple formula:
w=width of model
l=lenght of model
h=hight of model

Int((sqrt(((Photon Samples/(Photons Cast/(((w*l+l*h+h*w)*2)+Estimated additional surfaces))/3.14159)*100)/50)*50

But i would just suggest you download the sample area calculator... it's so much easier to use, and simple. lol Just click here

Jason, send over your project in a .zip file so I can check it out for problems.

Jason,

If you indent to make a film, I would not advise you use radiosity. Radiosity will considerably lengthen your render times and assuming 4h of render time per frame (which is not unreasonable with radiosity), that would mean 5 days of render times per second of film. Unless you have a render farm available, that is not very practicable. I would, instead, advise you use standard raytrace lighting setups without radiosity. For this I suggest you take a look at "The Lighting Tutorial" at the top of the Radiosity forum.

But if you really want to use radiosity, you will need to understand how to use it. I suggest you visit and read the Cornell Box tutorial in the pinned topics of the Radiosity forums. This tutorial is designed to give you the basic understandings from which you can start devisiing your own scenes.

As you can now probably understand, Radiosity is not an easy switch that you can turn ON to get nice renders. Properly using Radiosity requires understanding a lot of fundamental issues about lighting and materials.

It is difficult to comment and make suggestions from the renders you post because those can be the result of so many aspects and properties of your scene. However, I can already see that the surface properties of your objects are very unnaturally looking. You should probably start by making sure your surfaces have natural and plausible textures and properties.

i was never intending to use it for the movie as i know that it takes almost 40 mins to render 1frame
it was just to see how it works and get a better understanding of the process

i always like trying something new, which is kind of a problem for me since i never get anything done
i get stuck on something i just move to something else

i saw that turoial and i didnt understand anything it was talking about so i just expermented till i got something that looked better than normal

after i try that calulator thing ill see what comes out

Hope to see how it comes out.

ok i did a rerender after i tried a bunch of diffrent settings for an hour but this one came out the best

the final render took 13 hours to finish so defintly not a time saver solution but its looks better at least

so do you think it looks better now or do i have to try again?

For you, I think it would be better to have some form of light map decal which takes radiosity, converts it into a map, and pastes it on all of the surfaces in a scene, kind of like how it was in the old ways of radiosity as well as games. Render times would be dramatically decreased, and you would have radiosity (sort of). If you could, let me see your project file and I can see why it's taking so long. The frames you showed rendered don't seem like they would take a lot of time.

Also, your renders are very dark. The image below shows an increase in brigthness, and a slight change in the levels of the shot. If you can't seen anything in the shot, it's better to just use dim lights.

The flour tiles don't match the shot. I suggest going onto google image search and type in floor tiles, or tile. Save any tiles you think are good and make a map out of those.

I think This Tile would look kind of neat in the shot. You can use that most likely use that for both color, and a bump map.

im really not sure what you are saying so...
ill just send you the project file and show me what your talking about
and never heard of a lightmap before and have no idea where to find it.
what i used on the floor was a diffuse map and a bump map it gave just the right look.
the color map was a like too strong i think.
also dont worrie about the outside walls, decaled them for outside scences

also i couldnt get that calculator thing to work not sure how to open it or its an extsion file for AM
but i just couldnt figure it out

heres the project file

Thanks for putting that up for download, your project file allowed me to see exactly what was creating your problem. First off your light was a bulb, which was wasting thousands of rays into space, and it had 80% darkness shadows. You need to make the light a kleig with 100% darkness shadows, and 2 ray casts. Make sure to turn the width softness to 100% and the brightness to about 500%. I pulled the light further back so the change in the angle through each window wouldnt be that different. The lights new location is at x= -860cm y= 2165cm and z= -3020cm. Make sure you point it at the windows and is that the cone angle is wide enough to cover both of the holes completly. I used about 29 degrees.

I removed all your textures and colors to test the radiosity, so when you render the radiosity on your choreography it will be much darker because both your floor and desk are very dark and therefore do not radiate a lot of light onto other surfaces.

These are the settings i used to get the radiosity: (use these exact settings)

Photons Cast:100,000
Sample Area: 3050
Photon Samples: 100
Intensity: 100%
Max Bounces: 15
Caustics: OFF
Final Gathering: ON
Samples 200
Jittering: 20%
Precomputing Irradiance: OFF


Size: 1024x768
Render time: 2:34:48

Setting klieg lights softness to 100% is only valid for luminaire with a flat surface. If you are simulating a sun, you should set its softness to 0% and adjust the cone as tight as possible to light the windows and doors.

Another trick, if your light is shining from outside, make sure the external surfaces have a radiance of zero so they don't absorb photons for nothing.

wow ok i need to write some of this stuff down hehe
so istead of bulbs use keig lights ok i guess that would make sense i didnt know that it counted for the empty spaces as well
so ill try those settings use lighter colors (maybe wood) and try a rerender and see what it looks like then


thx alot guys for really helping me out

Hmmm... i thought that all radiosity needed 100% shoftness... but not for the sun aye? lol. I guess you learn somethin new every day.

ok quick qestion how would you set the radince for a surface

No. The 100% softness, as I mentionned, is only when modeling a flat luminaire as is the case in the Cornell Box. That is because if the luminaire is flat, it will cast less and less photons as the angle approaches the grazing angle. The same cosine principle as with light illuminating an angled surface. If you wanted to model a light bulb in a scene, then you should use a light bulb.

In the case of the sun, it would normally be a bulb but that would be overkill for a 3D scene and using a sun type of light for radiosity would be difficult to control so a klieg light is the best solution. But no softness because you are just basically constraining the sun light inside a cone.



It is in the surface properties. You might have to check the "Advanced" checkbox in the options "General" pannel.

Yves? So does that mean... with 0% softness... that there's the same amount of rays even on the outer ring of the light? Like... if i had softness to 100% the rays tend to fall off near the edge of the light? that's what i understand from that. Is that right?

Yes. That is right.

Width Softness describes how much, in percentage, of the klieg cone radius will be softened out to no light. Let's say a klieg with a 60° cone, so we have 30° from center of cone to outside edge. A Width softness of 33% would mean that light intensity is full from 0° (center) to 20° and then decreases, following a cosine function, from 20° to 30° (outside edge).

Of course, a width falloff of 0% means that the cone have constant illumination from center to 100% of its width and that there are no area where light intensity can falloff so the result is a constant illumination inside the whole cone and a sharp illumination edge.

ok took what you guys gave me and tried a test render with no textures and the same settings you gave me
i have no clue how you got 2:34:48
i guess my machine is just really really really slow
beucase my render time was just under 16 hours blah

anyway i reworked the whole scene changing textures and colors to try to get the most light out of the room and keeping the render time within a resonable time.

this render here took 6 hours
changed the desk color to a wood
made the walls completely white
got ride of the weird bump looking floor and just made it a rug
still came out a little dark though

Looking good jasson. What i'm seeing with all the radiosity renders you and i did are edge highlights... and this is quite unnatural.

Dont quote me on this, but i believe it's because your walls are not connected and solid. Normally you would construct and entire room like you would a box... and then you would construct the outer room like a box, and then connect the splines around doors and windows. Because the way radiosity ray blips create light through a light radius detection, you want to have solid walls that are both thick, and not connected to the inner walls, except for doors and windows. I think what's happening in your case is that rays got in the middle of the two wall sections and were able to reach into the room from the outside. This may or may not be true... but that's my best explination i have for it.

Yves? care to blow my explination out of the water? I wish i knew every little thing about radiosity like the radiosity god.

The orange circles indicate the edge highlights, and the blue circle indicates some wierd anamoly that's probably not related to your walls. I think that the edge of the desk attained pure white or some other pure color and resulted in bright noise artifacting all down the lenght of the desk, but i'm not sure.

ok i tried something diffrent
i moved the main liht to the right more to make it more direct into the room
next i added 2 more lights
1 light for outside of the front door
and the second light i put in the lamp
it came out a bit brighter and the light showing thru the walls has been fixed
im sure alot still has to be done to get it closer to realism but its getting kind of close now

Looking good jason. The only problem i see now, which isnt a radiosity problem, is that the light from your desk lamp is going strait through your desk... which is weird because the shadow on the chair is fine. You'd have to ask yves about this.

It's looking much better now.

That's normal. He simply needs to turn on "cast shadows" for that light.

For realism's sake, he might also want to dial the falloff on that desk lamp way down.

Also... you'd probably want the desk lamps softness brougth up as well. The light edge is very sharp and unnatural looking. 50-100% should do fine for the width softness.

i found what i did wrong its rendering as we speak i had it set on a keig light with 0% width softness thats why its so sharp why its going though the desk
ummm i dont know
time left on render 7:48:24 56% done

Wow... my render only took two and a half hours. Are you running other programs in the background? make sure you arent limiting the computer usage in the animation master options. My computer specs are listed... so it might be that my pc is faster. Hopefully it's casting shadows now.

my computer is just slow as dirt
and no nothing is running in the background as far as i know
ill be building a new machine in the future just for renderings
going to be sticking a AMD 64 4000+ with 5GB of Ram and Nvida 7800+ (just becuase its new)
just got to find the right motherboard and im set

i got 0:27:46 98% done
total time 14:19:57

Are you sure you don't have anything running? Make sure to check your microsoft configurations for startup programs. You can get there by typing msconfig in the run executable from your start menu and then select your startup tab. For now, just disable everything (Don't go on the internet) and check out the speed of animation master then. If it's still not going fast, perform a disk cleanup from your system tools. It will speed your computer up a bit. There's no reason why it should be going that slow with your specs, my $600 2000 EMachine ran faster than that.

ok i think i got most of this right
i was holding off doing another render until i can figure out what im doing wrong
(since each render is 13 hours) so i put a few testing renderings with some stock models to see what i did wrong
then i figured out how to do the calculations (nobody told me that the calculator thing was with excel and i dont have excel so i had to do them in my head)
after i figureed out what calculations i was doing wrong my render times were cut in half then half again
also i figured out the renders go alot quicker within a closed room or set

the render times for each picture are
test 1 8:56:23 no walls 3 lights
sample 500 20% jittering
test 2 3:23:46 walls 1 light
500 sample 0% jittering
test 3 3:13:21 walls 1 light
100 sample 20% jittering
test 4 3:14:25 walls 5 lights
100 sample 0% jittering

If you arent going to be using walls, you should consider skylight rigs instead of radiosity. They are way faster, and give the same general look. here's the link.

by the way... your dolls big eyes scare me....

The fourth render you made, did you make the lights have 2 rays casts ore more? There appears to be a lot of visual artifacts on the ground and even on the wall (like ghost images found on old televisions).

dan not sure about that skylight thing but im happy with the render times
its alot better than 13 hours so ill stick with what works for now
and what you mean they scare you hes cool looking lol

matt, yeah thats what happened just checked after you said that and i didnt set 2 rays for each light got to remeber to do that next time

Remember that you don't ned to use a lot of lights for radiosity. That's why we have photon maping. The only time you use that many lights is if your trying to replicate light in the shape of a luminare.

ok whats a luminaire if i may ask

The luminare is the light object in a scene.



In this picture it's the square at the top of the picture.