Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Cornell Box!?

So for something different, I decided to try my hand at lighting a simple Cornell Box, without the aid of global illumination or final gather.  The idea is to simulate the light bouncing around inside the box, specifically the subtle color bleed from the walls onto the objects and vice versa.

The image on the left has an ambient occlusion pass multiplied in, and the right image is lit with only standard maya lights.

 With AO                                                         Without AO

Render time was pretty good: about 30 seconds on my old mac laptop for the latter, with 34 lights.  Together the two setups took a little over an hour to set up and get to something I was happy with.

Anyway, it was a fun exercise.  Cheers!

2 comments:

David Suroviec said...

how long did the mental ray render take?

Unknown said...

I used the "mib_fast_occlusion" node for the AO pass, which took about a minute.

So the version without the AO did render a good bit faster, but with a little more setup time and more negative light tomfoolery. (Yes! I've been wanting to use that word this week!)