Spherical Harmonics = Awesome!

[GatesB]

Had a chance to play with this last night and it's freaking sweet!

It's seems to be:

* View Independent
* Resolution Independent
* Illumination Independent

Is there anything else you can change in the scene?

[vlado]

Only the environment and the direct lights can be changed without needing to recompute the spherical harmonics solution.

Best regards,
Vlado

[Komposer]

hmmm.. I cant find the SH Baking engine.
Please explane me the workflow.
Thanks

[vlado]

There is a short tutorial here: http://www.spot3d.com/vray/help/maya...s_sph_harm.htm

Best regards,
Vlado

[Komposer]

That helps...thanks

[aweidenhammer]

It is super interesting stuff. I'm still investigating to see how best to fit it into our pipeline. The biggest issue with it, is that you have to model for SH. Even spacing of faces, etc. Otherwise the baking quality varies greatly...

So it's a commitment to a new pipe from the get-go that keeps us from moving too fast. But I'm quite interested, and will try to push it in on smaller projects to test soon.

Andrew

[GatesB]

deleted post

[ultrasonic]

The biggest issue with it, is that you have to model for SH. Even spacing of faces, etc. Otherwise the baking quality varies greatly...

vlado: what about the idea of storing SH inside a pointcloud? So we could guarantee an even distribution even if the mesh wasn't built for storing SH efficiently?

[vlado]

We do have adaptive SH mesh generation now, it should mostly solve these issues.

Best regards,
Vlado

[ultrasonic]

that's great! I had a request a long time ago about rendering SH coefficients into an RenderElement for later use inside of nuke....are there any plans regarding that?