Hi Mark,
> I like the AO effect, except for the render times. Why not go for > full GI if it's only a little bit longer to render? First of all when I started to investigate I didn't know rendertimes would be that high. I was using this effect several times in Cinema4D projects, where it is much faster. Although I never used it for complete scenes, only for certain subobjects or areas I wanted to darken in the corners. I did a little test with the same setup in C4D and RS, imagesize and renderquality roughly the same: RS pure render 6 sec. C4D pure render 1 sec. RS A0 195 sec. C4D AO 9 sec. As you can see there's an enormous difference in handling AO between C4D and RS. About GI: This effect has quite a different effect. Just for fun I tried to use both shaders at the same time. I switched off both additional lights. See the attached image to see the result. IMHO the combination has quite an interesting result. Left image is only GI, right image my combinated diffuse_AO and GI. > > The effect of a single large special light that surrounds the scene > (a hollow cylinder without bottom cap works well) can mimic the AO > effect pretty well but again, render times can pose a problem if you > set lightsource quality high enough to get rid of the noise. But that > way you avoid glass and fog problems. Never tried such a special light, as up to this moment I always avoided GI and such special lights because of rendertimes. All the renders I made so far were based upon "normal" lights, I only use the soft shadows (not shadowmaps). > > Aaah! I tried your project on a single monitor setup and couldn't get > to the Properties window; the pre-SP3 solution didn't work any more > (delete some files in Documents and Settings\....). Can someone > refresh my memory on how to solve this without hassling with monitors? Check the force to screen box in startup options. Arjo.
<<attachment: gi&ao.jpg>>
