I've stuck together a little page of various different GI settings examples.
Most of you probably know all this stuff already but, I figure this might be a handy reference point for people new to TG2 or, to 3D scene building in general.
You might just like to see directly the differences between GI settings.
I could sit for hours(and I do, it's you guys who make the pretty pictures in here! :)) just playing with settings and testing them against each other to find out their purpose and uses, might as well document this one, since I think it could be a handy reference to some folks.
To the untrained eye, GI effects aren't all that easy to differentiate between, especially in a regular, built up landscape scene, which we mostly see coming from TG2.
Here, Terragen's GI settings are used in a general purpose illumination room made inside the program. The differences between various levels and options are very clear to see in such a setting.
Hopefully, this will go some way to help illustrate the outputs and to help anyone who isn't sure to get a handle on TG's GI system and, when to use what settings.
So, should you like to visit, here is the page link:
http://sites.google.com/site/d4nd310/tg2gi
Cheers! :)
Great work there dandelO, looks great.
Dandelo
Many thanks for that. Its very interesting
Thanks for making this. 8) I downloaded the video for reference. This makes the settings more clear than anything I have read.
A higher quality video, hosted at Vimeo, is now up in its place, Henry. YouTube ruins everything I upload, that was just a place marker until the Vimeo upload was ready(there's a half-hour queue for unpaid membership uploads).
New video link: http://vimeo.com/12570183
Cheers, folks! :)
Awesome, thanks Martin.
Every once in a great while, a hero comes along to lead the pack - whatever the endeavor - you are one of these guys for TG2!
Thank you!
Hey Martin, this is a really good page! I'm sure it'll be helpful for a lot of our fellow terraworkers. Why not add a few samples with fill lights as 'cheap' alternatives, to show the differences.
The Vimeo vid is flv format. I am currently having difficulty getting these to play in Media Player and Media Center. The K-Lite codec pack does not seem to work quite right with Windows 7 64 bit.
The YouTube version gets the point across well.
Quote from: njeneb on June 15, 2010, 08:41:10 AM
The Vimeo vid is flv format. I am currently having difficulty getting these to play in Media Player and Media Center. The K-Lite codec pack does not seem to work quite right with Windows 7 64 bit.
VLC - the best video player ever. You can throw pretty much everything and anything at this baby. Also available to windows, mac, and linux :).
http://www.videolan.org/
Media Player Classic Home Cinema - in combination with ffdshow tryouts the best video player for windows ever.
http://ffdshow-tryout.sourceforge.net/
http://mpc-hc.sourceforge.net/
http://www.cccp-project.net/
I know the page seems not like a codec pack page ;D
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_Community_Codec_Pack
http://www.cccp-project.net/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page
Before you ask :
"Exactly what is the CCCP Insurgent?
CCCP Insurgent (CCCPI) is a program that is able to detect other playback packs and thus help you (and us) in the troubleshooting process."
http://www.cccp-project.net/wiki/index.php?title=CCCP_Insurgent
VLC or KMplayer are the future, forget troublesome codec packs. Both work awesome in w7 64bit as well.
And dandelO, thanks for that video, pretty much told me what I expected to see - I'm quite impressed by the object rendering here, what sort of scene do you have in this one?
great comparison, thanks! :)
I echo Frank et al....cheers!
Great reading, thanks for your work dandelO :-)
I'm sure it will be very helpful for everybody to understand how lightning works in Terragen 2.
I echo all the previous comments and emphasize the YOU ARE MY HERO part...learned more in the short time viewing that than in all my experiments...well done man.. ...
great job !!!
Cool, thanks for the pleasant responses, everyone! :)
Dune: Good idea, I'll get around to some more examples shortly, I have another couple of images to update at the end with I think. Then, I'll think about alternative lightings. This is still a kind of limited set of examples, focusing on GI on surfaces and not really the atmospheric side of the envirolight, I might try an atmosphere GI comparison thingy at some point.
It serves some purpose for now, anyway.
Cheers again! :)
After reviewing the video I had a light bulb moment....what is happening is a 'caustics event' as it's producing, to my eye, a very nice 'Radiosity' [a sorta holy grail render for me] render at the higher levels...am I correct or blowing smoke out my ears again?
Checking the 'GI surface details' is what creates the really accurate shadows and illumination casting from the balls onto the floor. Dark shadows and bright highlights, right around the points-of-contact of each of the casting objects. I've tried with transparency shaders to generate real caustics but, no luck yet, it does appear, very nicely, with luminosity, though.
I have a couple of other renders that I'll placemark in the meantime here, both used 'GI SD' and were(roughly) the same length of render; The settings 'GI - RD=2/SQ=12 + Surface details + extra ambient light' took about 52 minutes for me to render:
[attachimg=#]
And this one, at 'GI - RD=4/SQ=8 + Surface details + extra ambient light':
[attachimg=#]
Took about an hour and 7 minutes.
Both times don't differ that much, for the large difference in render settings, when 'Surface details' is checked. It does add a lot of render time but it's worth it if you need a good, realistically lit close-up, a still life render, car showroom-type-scene, etc.
(The 2/12 render above appears flawed as the shadows seem to disappear closer to the object points of contact in some places, I noticed when it was rendering that the wall, which rendered before the objects, wasn't taking the shadows correctly, the one at 4/8 did fine and, looks very nice, I think.)
Quote from: bobbystahr on June 18, 2010, 07:12:26 PM
render at the higher levels...am I correct
I wouldn't say that, pare it back as far as possible! ;) but, to make the best of the lighting, don't use a GI relative detail of '1', if you require lots of important GI details.
If you mean 'higher levels' of
render detail, the way I have it worked out in my head(wrongly, 9 out of 10 times) is that, to get matching lighting quality, between different render details, a relative detail of 2/2, at a
render detail of '1', is equivalent(in terms of lighting detail) to GI of 4/4, at render detail 0.5. Is that right? I've never studied the actual 'relativity' to the render detail of GI relative detail. ??? :D
Hmmmm...lots to mull over here whilst I find an interior scene to try this out with...what did you use for the extra ambient light btw?
Quote from: bobbystahr on June 19, 2010, 02:00:03 AM
Hmmmm...lots to mull over here whilst I find an interior scene to try this out with...what did you use for the extra ambient light btw?
...the Cornell Box http://www.graphics.cornell.edu/online/box/ (http://www.graphics.cornell.edu/online/box/)?
Bye!!!
Very useful reference. Perhaps add it to the wiki? ;D
- Oshyan
Quote from: Oshyan on June 19, 2010, 03:33:23 AM
Very useful reference. Perhaps add it to the wiki? ;D
- Oshyan
Indeed.. ...
Quote from: bobbystahr on June 19, 2010, 02:00:03 AM
Hmmmm...lots to mull over here whilst I find an interior scene to try this out with...what did you use for the extra ambient light btw?
Here's a quote from near the bottom of the GI examples page, Bobby:
Quote*** Extra ambience comes, in this case, in the form of a negatively scaled(inside-out), white sphere, encapsulating the entire scene(Just like a scaled down version of the default 'background' node, which you can use for this purpose in a regular landscape shot). A tiny amount of luminosity is used on this capsule-sphere(0.005). This helps to bounce more light around and add some extra lighting to everything, without increasing exposure or raising the 'Envirolight' GI strength settings, similar to the way a photographer would use a white-reflector to do the same job. Luminosity values for the reflector sphere are subjective according to scales etc, I found that at this smaller scale(a capsule sphere of -25m enclosing the 10m room) higher luminosity values than 0.01 were easily blowing-out all the lighting/shadow details, the final setting of 0.005 that I ended up with just gives a nice little boost to the ambience. Quite nice and not too heavy on the renderer.
A wee bit luminosity on this capsule sphere bounces a bit more light around the entire scene, it adds practically nothing to the render time and brightens things up quite nicely.
Oshyan: Indeed, I have already done this when I'd posted it here, it's listed under 'TG2 Tips and Tricks', the last entry so far... http://www.planetside.co.uk/wiki/index.php/Terragen_2_Tips_and_Tricks#Global_Illumination_Examples_page
Thanks dandelO...dunno how I missed that.. ...good trick btw.. ....
Quote from: latego on June 19, 2010, 02:55:17 AM
Quote from: bobbystahr on June 19, 2010, 02:00:03 AM
Hmmmm...lots to mull over here whilst I find an interior scene to try this out with...what did you use for the extra ambient light btw?
...the Cornell Box http://www.graphics.cornell.edu/online/box/ (http://www.graphics.cornell.edu/online/box/)?
Bye!!!
LOL..thanks but I meant one I have on my drive already.. ...