Radiosity renders look fabulous

[robcat2075]

Here is another modern render of one of my old Animation Showdown animations.

I added a school gymnasium set and rendered with radiosity.

 

A birdseye view of the chor looks like this. The set is a completely enclosed box with two kleig lights in the ceiling...

 

A conventional render with those two lights gets this...

 

That is very severe. If I were going to use conventional lighting I would need add a number of fill lights in strategic places.

Here is a radiosity render. The shadow areas are no longer pitch black and there is visible detail even where the lights do not directly shine.

 

Overall, however, it is too dark for my taste. Increasing the Intensity of the lights so that the charcters were well illuminated caused the brightest spots on the floor to become overbright and clip.

Instead I applied a gamma correction to the radiosity render. I''m liking this much better...

 

 

Unfortunately, the shadowing that was indistinct in the raw render is now ever weaker. To give that some more bite i rendered a pass with ScreenSpace Ambient Occlusion (SSAO)...

 

... and composited that by "multiplying" it with the Radiosity. I did that in After Effects but an A:M "composite Project" can do the same operation.

This PNG alternates "before" and "after"...

 

SSAO has no anti-aliasing so I had to render those at 3x3 times the normal resolution to make smooth versions suitable for compositing.

When A:M introduced Radiosity our computers weren't ready for it. Each render took so long that animation was unthinkable. But now with a modern CPU and NetRender it is within reach.

My 640x480 test renders for this scene took only about 3 minutes per frame. After i got my settings decided and cranked up the quality, the full-frame final renders took only about 20 minutes each.

 

Get started with Radiosity with Yves Poissant's Cornell Box Tutorial

Learn more at Yves Poissant's Radiosity/Photon Mapping Pages