demystifying luminious panels, shaders plugins, autoparts

[darickster]

Jure,
With all the new stuff being implemented i get very confused as to what approach is needed lighting interiors with luminious panels in combination with the shader plugins, autoparts plugin.

Ive seen great results on the forum but i believe a lot of people including myself are not using this technology because there are no concrete rules on how to implement them, just user knowledge that varies a lot. I believe the skyportals technology will be built on top of this so could we get some nutshell info on the topic?

Am i the only one wanting to get this clear?

thanks

[florian]

I'll start with a tip:

The shader is especially usefull for exteriors with Trees. You can then use very low GI settings on the trees and speed up rendering this way.

[keeejreeej]

I use the surfaceoption plugin only to reduce rays on leaves of trees. But I agree some more info on this as well as the correct use of autoparts plugin is very welcome..
To be honest i think it's pretty chaotic at the moment. All kinds of (partial) manuals online or down-loadable, forum posts about new commands... adds to the confusion.

[darickster]

maybe i wasnt clear on the topic, i know i can limit FG for selected surfaces using the shader. My question is, how would you setup luminious polygons, for instance does it involve setting the force indirect rays.. also what object settings do these polygons need for example unseen by camera, maybe unseen by rays too?

If it says it adds lumilights during rendering that would mean i am on the right track? If lumi polys take up the same space as a window will that affect the glass surface or the light thats being cast.

In a nutshell: Where do i place these polys, what do i need to enter to make them work well, values i can work out myself just want a good start.

cheers

[silverlw]

I think the problem is that people dont understand how "indirect mode" works and how "direct mode" work. Kray have many ways of calculating the light and "Auto mode" is a mix of both indirect/direct together.

Here is a simple scene 2planes luminous 1000% where i have forced the right luminous plane to indirect with kraysurface options. The direct causes "grain" like lw arealights but are very exact and the other causes splotches with low settings but might be very quick in some situations. When kray is set to Luminosity modell/Auto it will try to render those luminous surfaces above 100% as direct and those under 100% as indirect.

[silverlw]

Here is kray with more luminous lightsources and still using auto mode. Kray will see the 12 different lightsources as ONE lumelight (reported in statuswindow) since we havent divided them into parts manually or by using krayautoparts plugin. All luminous surfaces have different intensitys so some under 100% will render as indirect (splotchy) and some will render as direct (grainy) but for Kray all those rendering as direct are one and the same lightsource so all luminous rays will be shared among them and result is far from perfect.

[silverlw]

Here i told Kray to render all luminous surfaces as direct but since kray still renders them as one lumelight, rays will be shared among them. Very grainy!

[silverlw]

Now i have divided the 12 luminous objects into 12 parts and renders it with same settings as before but now krays see every luminous surface as one separate lumeobject so it reports 12 lumeobjects added. Starts to look much better. As a rule of thumb, the more luminous lights there is and the better lit the scene is the lower values of rays needed which affects speed. With some mix of indirect/direct and dividing luminous objects into parts it's often enough with Luminosity rays min1/max1

[jure]

I think Johan pretty much covered it all with this tests!

[silverlw]

Someone asked about geometry and here ive turned up the wolfram thread/the little glowing thingy inside a lightbulb into a a luminous surface. That tiny object is the only lightsource in the scene. I used luminous treshold min1/max1 so it's rather noisy but shadows are still very exact as you can see.

[Pheidian]

Thanks mate! You really can explain stuff easily, I bet people will now understand better the use of lumilights...

Though have to say that part thing was still pretty unknown to me... So you manually assign different luminous models as different parts in modeller, and that's it? No matter if they have identical lightning properties etc?

EDIT SILVERLW: Yes even if they have identical lightproperties and intensities they should be divided into parts, to get separate calculations for each lightsource. When Kray starts to report about "found 100-200 lumilights" it's more than enough and preprocessing of the lumilights starts to take longer and longer time so there is a sweetspot about 50-100 depending on the scene. FINISH EDIT:

I've been strugling with this now, having a room with only one small window, and should be lit up with neat atmospheric feeling... gotta play around with this...[/b][/quote]

[darickster]

thanks silver! that hit the spot (or should i say lumi )