spherical harmonics in max version?

[joconnell]

Fair enough!

[grantwarwick]

It was used in Avatar to bake in GI/Occlusion on the plants/environments?
How much more efficient is this than old school approaches?

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

Heya

Here is a lovely long article about it... It is from what I read is it quite simply but I guess you need some tools to make it automatic? Have yet to try it out myself...

http://www.fxguide.com/featured/the-...-weta-digital/

[joconnell]

It was used in Avatar to bake in GI/Occlusion on the plants/environments?
How much more efficient is this than old school approaches?

I suppose one thing is that the renderman crowd have always had painfully slow raytracing so perhaps rather than them getting efficiencies it's more a case of they need to use this to bring their gi to a viable level? Rather than vray just being brutally fast by comparison?

[anchovy]

We will look back one day, to all of these band-aids that have been employed just to make scenes renderable and shake our heads as to how much work was done.

I was talking to friends this weekend that are over at pixar, where they have just started using GI as we know it and they have been amazed at how much time they could cut out of the schedule for lighting. WHAT? yo dont need hundreds of lights to make this look like that?

Honestly im sure it not quite like that but its nice to see that even old dogs can learn new tricks and I hope it helps them continue to make amazing films.

-Michael

www.morphographic.com

[kriscabrera15]

Why SH when we have VRAY! hahah but yea i think SH should be included, i think its most useful when you are using these massive amounts of data sets, and one thing vray does good is proxys. I think SH would be a nice feature for vray new version.......=)

[Macker]

Meh, doesn't interest me when we have the likes of RT and the production renderer at our disposal.