Image Based Lighting?

[sb4]

Wikipedia mentions that A:M Version 14 (2007) introduces Ambient Occlusion (AO) and Image-based Lighting (IBL).

 

Can someone explain what those are?

 

Regards,

 

-SB

[Fuchur]

Wikipedia mentions that A:M Version 14 (2007) introduces Ambient Occlusion (AO) and Image-based Lighting (IBL).

 

Can someone explain what those are?

 

Regards,

 

-SB

 

AO is a very nice rendering-trick, which is often used for product-shots or full-sun lightening-situations... it creates very soft shadows with nicely lit areas. AO in v14 is CPU-based and quite slow... A:M v17 is much faster with real AO and has a plugin called "FastAO / FakeAO" which can fake AO-lightening in close to realtime speed. (GPU-based or CPU-based).

 

Typical AO-renderings are those white renderings with nice smooth occlusion-areas and "soft-shadows" you may have seen from time to time. AO is not fast, but much much faster than for instance Radiosity while for certain situations it can create very nice images too.

 

IBL (ImageBasedLigtenting) is used with AO, but used not a white or single-color way of brightening up a scene but will use an image (often HighDynamicRange-Images) to make a scene look cool.

And the best part: You can blend AO or IBL with any kind of standard-lightenting for the best results...

 

See this thread for a few nice images:

Lightening Tests

 

See you

*Fuchur*

[John Bigboote]

Here's a fundy-mental IBL question... to generate an IBL based render, one would:

 

-Delete, turn off, or diminish the lights from the scene.

-Specify Image based lighting from the Choreography's Properties, and set an image to generate the lighting from (preferably an IBL image)

-Activate Ambient Occlusion in the Choreographies properties, and in the render dialogue.

 

Render?

 

OR- does one need to set-up an environmental dome and apply an image upon that as well... ?

[robcat2075]

Here's a fundy-mental IBL question... to generate an IBL based render, one would:

 

-Delete, turn off, or diminish the lights from the scene.

-Specify Image based lighting from the Choreography's Properties, and set an image to generate the lighting from (preferably an IBL image)

-Activate Ambient Occlusion in the Choreographies properties, and in the render dialogue.

 

Render?

 

OR- does one need to set-up an environmental dome and apply an image upon that as well... ?

 

Bachelor #1

 

the IBL is a light source like other lights, it illuminates things without being visible itself to the camera. You only need the dome if you want the camera to see sky in the background.

 

That is my understanding of it.

[John Bigboote]

THE REASON- I ask... is because I tried the above method the other day in the latest version (V 17.0E? 64bit) and got strange results... crashy-strange. Can someone else confirm that IBL (above method) does work in V17.0E

[robcat2075]

THE REASON- I ask... is because I tried the above method the other day in the latest version (V 17.0E? 64bit) and got strange results... crashy-strange. Can someone else confirm that IBL (above method) does work in V17.0E

 

It's a lot easier if you post a sample PRJ

 

(and are you saying it works fine if you do the second route?)