Comments on: Experimental: Reflection Node, Image Based Lighting

By: Seb Pelan

Seb Pelan — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 00:15:34 +0000

Lovely. I really really really hope an experimental build shows up soon!

By: shul

shul — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 13:58:28 +0000

@matt: ok, I was referring to nodes which can be applied in render time on the whole image (or parts of it) while using render information and not only compositing at the end.

By: Ben

Ben — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 11:12:41 +0000

Great news for someone who has been looking into hdri and ibl a fair bit recently. Incidentally, the noise problem with AO and IBL in 2.45 can be helped a lot by setting the "filter" setting in the texture panel to 1.5-ish. That blurs it all out a bit and helps heaps. (I forgot who posted that on BA, but big kudos to them).

http://uploader.polorix.net//files/12/hdriSetup1.blend

That is a really simple setup with what I stated, packed with a really simple hdri. AO Samples set to 16, so there is still a major speed issue doing it this way, but it works quite well.

All the best Matt with the coding!

By: Buba

Buba — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 07:03:18 +0000

Thank you very much for your answers.

By: Tynach

Tynach — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 05:36:08 +0000

Oh, so is this the method used in Nexuiz when you turn on "use HDRI lighting"? If this is meant for realtime rendering, might this be incorporated into the Blender game engine?

By: Jon

Jon — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 13:53:42 +0000

Thanks for clarifying Matt. It means this is awesome development work. Good image based lighting would be a great leap forward for Blender. You da man!

By: Matt

Matt — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 13:37:31 +0000

Not really.. It's kinda possible to do it in 2.45, using the AO 'sky texture' option. However in practise, the results are next to useless, it's extremely noisy. The new QMC AO thats's in Blender SVN versions at the moment is much better ( http://mke3.net/blender/devel/raytracing/sphere_vs_hammersley_ibl-h264.mov – left is 2.45 AO, right is Constant QMC) but it's still quite slow.

By: Jon

Jon — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 13:24:36 +0000

Sorry. I think my question above was a bit dumb. I guess Matt's work has been to create the first way of doing image based lighting. Is that correct?

By: Jon

Jon — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 13:19:34 +0000

Is there currently any way of doing image based lighting (with or without HDRI light probes) in Blender 2.45. Even if it's faking it. And if so does anyone know of any tutorials or guides? Thanks gurus.

By: Matt

Matt — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 13:13:52 +0000

Buba, I'll post a patch when it's ready. I have some other priorities at the present though, so it may be a little while until I can finish it off. It's currently working as a panel in the world buttons, where you (will be) able to choose a blender image block to prefilter, or just use an image from one of the world texture channels. It will only work with images in the 'Angular Map' or 'LatLong Panorama' layout (you can convert to and from these in HDRShop).

shul, I'm not sure what you mean. The raytrace node is a material node, it controls the material that gets rendered.