#True Reflections
11 messages in this thread
Does anyone know of a routine that exists now or may in the future that will
allow selective raytracing in a 3DS scene or a new special way of mapping true
reflections of the surrounding scene onto geometry (such as rippling water,
etc)?
Automatic Reflections just don't always cut it.
Thanks in advance.
Brian D
Take a look in the libraries for examples of refraction mapping.
Also take a look at REFRDEMO.ZIP in the IPAS usage library.
DM
You should take a look at RayMan the 3DS raytracer. You can render single
objects (or selected objects, or selected regions or…) if you want and you
can compose the raytraced object with your 3DS rendered scene.
RayMan can render (real) reflections and refractions. Everything can be blurry
if you want. My favorite features are the shadows. I don`t know a PC program
that can produce the same realistic shadows like RayMan does.
Michael
>> I don`t know a PC program that can produce the same realistic shadows
>> like RayMan does.
You obviously haven't seen LightScape. Incredible radiosity based program,
real light inputs (from manufacturer's specs), and almost as fast as a scanline
renderer!
I saw it at the Autodesk road show last week, they showed it reading 3DS files,
running on a PC under NT, with SGI support, also, for those of you not
financially impaired :^). I've never seen such realism in an architectural
renderer.
Greg Pyros
Hi Greg,
well I`ve heard about Lightscape for SGI but I haven`t seen the Windows NT
version. I agree with you that radiosity creates better shadows than RayMan 1.5
(but wait for the 3DSMAX version <bg>).
The only problem in radiosity is when you have moving objects or lights in
your scene. Well that doesn`t happend very often in pure architecural animation
(walk/fly throughs) but if your customer want to close and open the doors you
have to say: well guy, what do you want: moving doors or shadows ?
I hope this problem will be solved in the near future…
Michael
Michael:
I suppose you could render the whole animation using radiosity w/o doors, and
render a separate doors pass in 3DS and composite the two….
Dave
Did they show the ability to save .3DS files, too? With that, you can
*quickly* render the pre-lit unshaded faces without any lights in the scene…
you could have one of those wonderfully lit 3D objects back in your 3DS
environment. In other words, we've got a copy of Lightscape and we're working
on the InterChange converter for their file format. 🙂
John:
Fancy seeing you here!
>> Did they show the ability to save .3DS files, too?
Talked about it, but didn't actually see it operating there. Should be a great
feature, and I can't wait to have the ability to quickly add radiosity to 3D
Studio animations easily!
That's the main reason I'm interested in it, just to have the high quality
renderings available as backgrounds for 3DS animations. It seems like we
finally found a tool that makes sense for this!
Greg Pyros
Greg,
Lightscape sounds interesting. I'll have to ask Adesk for a demo reel or
samples. Are there any Lightscape images on Ci$ that you know of?
>Lightscape sounds interesting. I'll have to ask Adesk for a demo reel or
samples. Are there any Lightscape images on Ci$ that you know of?<
If you have Internet access they are at www.lightscape.com. They have some nice
images up there.
Martin:
>> Lightscape sounds interesting. I'll have to ask Adesk for a demo
>> reel or samples. Are there any Lightscape images on Ci$ that you know of?
No, but you can see their ads in some of the SGI mags. Autodesk doesn't own,
it, it is by a company called LightScape out of northern California.
The NT version isn't shipping yet, so the SGI platform is the only one with
results so far. Have you tried "GO SGI"? :^) Oh, righto, they don't have a
forum…
Greg Pyros