Lecture 8 - Digital Craft Render Details

Concepts covered in class today:
Global Illumination and Final Gather in Mental Ray

• avoiding long render times for outdoor renders by enclosing the whole scene in a hemisphere
• making the hemsiphere normals face inward so it is visible
  
• using a map on the hemisphere as a background - improvement over an environment background
• Final Gather as a means of producing quick outdoor renders
• 10,000 minimum photons may produce blotchiness which may be 'solved' by FG but may not
• creating a light that ONLY shines on selected objects to illuminate the background sky...
  

HDR images

• what are they?
• Debevec and Ward websites as resources for their work on HDRI
• use of HDR as output that is flexible from LightStudio
• Use of HDR images as a source of light in a scene
• (as an aside - use of a map in a light definition in Viz as a means of cheaply creating shadows)
• requirement to include an HDR image in the final hand in
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