Rendering - Lecture 5 - Digital Craft - 2007

Global Illumination - reviewing what it is and how to do it in Viz using Light Studio and Mental Ray was the pedagogical goal...

The reality?

We addressed the issue of Simulation, Simulacra, Reality and 'Hyper-reality' - more by reference to the issue of perception and the goals of communication via the image - than by a full review of Baudrillard (Wikipedia ref) or of the hyper-reality of Virtual Reality and High Resolution images.

The basic message was that the focus of image making in the course ought to be on communication of a story NOT merely on some highly detailed, high contrast, ray-traced-within-an-inch-of-its-life image. Contrasting images from Final Fantasy with images from Shrek is highly revealing of this. In the former, the focus and the hype of the original release was about the amount of time spent modelling Dr Aki Ross and the realism of the hair, skin and eyes. The truth is that the non-realistic rendering of the characters and the scenography in Shrek is far more involving of the audience, has far more character development pathis and humour. What is important in Shrek is a focus on the story - not the technology. The same should apply to every image produced in the course.

In addition, we reviewed again the tutorial 'Comparing Rendering Techniques' particularly the portion about the use in computer Graphics of bump, opacity and displacement maps. These can be used in normal scanline rendering in Viz. To produce realistic materials in Light Studio one cannot use these techniques - rather one must use special Light Studio materials with applied 'procedural' files that allow far faster rendering than the map approach.

The bulk of the lecture content was focused on the phenomenon of Global Illumination - a means of calculating light distribution in a space. Photon mapping, Backwards and Forwards Ray tracing and Radiosity were all described briefly.

At the end, the ability of the Deep Publish plug in within Powerpoint, Word and Excel to import 3D files so they remain interactive was demonstrated briefly.