hi,

I was searching for topics that suggest the addition of Golbal illumination to iclone,
but from what I see here the discussion went away a little bit,

AO is a great addition, now for the next big thing, the addition of global illumination to iclone.

I can't right now produce any high-end quality animations for TV broadcasting or commercials because local companies are using global illumination most of the time and the work I believe can be done with iclone, we simply need the upgrade for it.

iclone has great tools from what I see and tried, but I can't use it for production yet, I render my work using 3ds max mental ray global illumination & scanline sometimes because I need to produce that smooth shading and soft shadows - I believe I can take it further to an editing suite like Adobe after effects to achieve this.. but global illumination is something else.

iclone will be very competitive and attractive just by looking at the screenshots produced with global illumination. its the future whether you try to avoid having it now or later, you will eventually going to need it ! and with multi-threaded processing and pure hardware processing (utilizing ATI & Nvidia processing cores) it will be amazing.

I feel if it will ever going to be added its going to be in some different iclone version, because its a big step. If screenshots is what matters the most to attract more people to iclone, then you can't go wrong with global illumination! post as much as you want with an eye-candy quality that hardly needs further editing to please the audience !

True, I've not played with this too much, but IBL does work unless you have too high of shine on things...? Maybe I don't know what I'm talking about but I know an ambiane feature that you can animate with would be great.

Thanks for the link West. I'll see what I can do with them.

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I agree here, animating with IBL and hdri is hard, the problem comes from the exposure setting, on real video cameras this gets auto balanced for you , in iclone you have to balance it yourself/keyframe it. I think the biggest problem people run into when using IBL and HDR is that they use IBL as their main source of light. A way to make it more manageable if you use IBL as a source of light that mimics indirect lighting and the effect should be on very soft. Also, materials with high specular and/or diffuse factors will brake the balance of the image(make it blown out) so you might have to animate the textures overtime. Hopefully RL will give us an autobalance feature with the option of manual override. ;)

Hope this helps,

Stuckon3d



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Thanks for the Smart IBL link.

My experience is that if one wants to produce still images from iClone 4, HDR and IBL can enhance the lighting. But so far I have not been able to use them in animations. It is very difficult to control once things (avatar, camera, etc) gets moving. Maybe the next iClone version can have an improvement?

To be honest, this discussion has gone somewhat over my head. :hehe: Yet another reason to follow the rest of you into StuckOn3D's classes.

However, I think everyone will be interested in this link I got from Maxxon via Twitter:

Smart IBL

General Picture - animating now to life itself(tm)
Member of Content Wizards

Very nice and informative discussion. As always the development team will review your suggestions and try to implement these features in future versions of iClone. Thanks everyone for the feedback.

                                                                

Peter
Forum Administrator

www.reallusion.com

Ah thanks... hmmm... this is for an older version though. I think they've moved some of the panels around.

But thanks all the same. Does this talk about baking light maps or AO maps too?

I kind of know how to use the basic features.

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hi dreamcube,
this would be a good start for you. And you can find other cool stuff at the blender home page.


http://blenderunderground.com/2007/07/18/blender-basics-part-1-video-tutorial-completed/

http://www.blender.org/features-gallery/feature-videos/?video=bake_to_uv

Cheers,

Stuckon3d



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Well if I can find a tutorial on it, that'd be great.

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***BEST OF THE CORE**
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My other audio work.

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@dreamcube

have you tried using blender? that does have ambient occlusion mapping and creation capabilities. The GUI is not the best but it has all the functions you are looking for. Plus is free.



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