Easy GI Setup In Max

FatAssasin

I just recorded a video showing a unique way of quickly setting up your scene for global illumination lighting. I show how to use mental ray, final gather, a sphere, vertex painting, and the Lume Glow shader to be able to quickly try out different lighting schemes and change the overall lighting in you scene to get it looking just like you want it.

It's a technique I stumbled across while experimenting with the Glow shader, and it' seems to work pretty good. Have fun, and let me know if you find it useful.

You need the techsmith codec to view it. It's a 75 meg download.

http://jhaywood.com/images/VertexGILighting_techsmith.avi

Slum

Nice work. I never really thought about that sort of method. Thanks for the video.

rooster

pretty cool idea, like it a lot. I wonder if its feasable to use this lighting method exclusively in a cg render/animation, or if its best suited to just deciding upon a lighting scheme?

what spec PC did you use to render that, and how many samples do you have to use to get rid of all the artifacts?

definately will have a play about with it, cheers

Noren

Sounds interesting.
May I ask you to leave it online for some days, since I have a very slow internet connection right now ? Just in case.

hawken

really nice. Thanks!

FatAssasin

rooster: I haven't tried using this method in a full production yet, I'm still in the experimentation phase with MR. But I'm in the process of developing some FMV's (pre-rendered cinamatics) at work for our next project, so eventually I'll give this a shot with a real scene and see how it holds up. We used scanline rendering exclusively for our last set of FMV's (Dungeon Seige 2), but I want to move on to MR for our future cinematics, mainly so we can start using a real skin shader.

I have an 2.0ghz AMD64, with a gig of ram. It renders pretty quick mainly because I was using such a simple scene for the example. But I'm sure the render times will start creeping much higher with a real production type scene. But I've found overall, with Final Gather, that in a scene with a lot going on, as far as number of objects and actual textures, you can get away with fewer samples than you would need for objects with just a straight grey texture on them. All the textures in the scene tend to cover up any unsightly FG artifacts.

Noren: Yeah, I'll keep it up there indefinitely. I'll probably re-record it to tighten it up a bit before adding it to my site. I just wanted to see if you guys thought it was useful information first.

And you all should seriously try out the Lume shaders that you can unhide like I show in the video. Read the help file and see what's available. I find them all much easier and more intuitive to use than the defualt MR shaders that are available. Why they're hidden in the first place, I have no idea. It's one of those odd Autodesk decisions that make you wonder what they're thinking and if they're purposely trying to make Max more difficult to use than it should be.

Noren

Looks like a fun and intuitive method to me
And the additional info is welcomed, too.
You might get rid of the artifacts by sacrificing some of the detail in favour of a more blurred Final Gather solution or by using no FG at all and adjusting the settings in the GI tab, might be faster in some cases. But I have hardly any experience with MR.
You might want to post it in the CGtalk MR-Shader thread, in order to get some more MR related feedback.