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Point clouds being "inspired" from real-time technology... besides, there's heaps of funky stuff you can do with point clouds i.e: take the LIDAR scan of the set, reproject the multiple HDR probes back onto the geo from their location in 3D space to get a HDR mapped set, bake the illumination into a point cloud that you can then use with importance sampling for directional "area" shadows (without a single CG light source, be gone with them!)... then, if you have the inhouse resources (developers who can write your ptcloud paint system), you can "paint" the point cloud for lighting changes, on top of being able to add ye olde CG light for when you need to get creative... you use the HDR information gathered on set fully rather than simply using it as an ambient fill to augment your CG key lighting.
This ensures that a character in a corner of the set won't be illuminated the same as a character in the center of the room, (which is what you typically get when using FG with an HDR environment map), shadows will much more closely match the shadows on set etc...
Anyway, that's just one of the many things one can imagine with point clouds, as you can pretty much store anything you want in there (super fast soft reflections: http://graphics.pixar.com/SoftReflections/paper.pdf). Besides it being super fast at rendering, when lighting lots of characters, having it baked once does start to make a difference...
On 14/02/2008, Raffaele Fragapane <raffsxsilist(at)googlemail.com> wrote:
You heard pretty wrong then, and you probably heard a few years ago; not to mnetion what is GI exactly is a hairy issue these days.
If you mean a first bounce gathering and AmbOcc (like the GI sony and dneg use) then you'll find PRMan has passed MRay at that a while ago, and 3delight completely craps all over PRMan in terms of speed in those regards.
You could rather have your machines work for hours, but first you'd have to make them work through a full frame without going down in flames.
On Thu, Feb 14, 2008 at 11:57 AM, < xsi(at)tidbit-images.com> wrote:
Good point about render times, but I'd rather have my machines work for hours than me to be brutally honest.
And, from what I hear, rendering GI isn't particularily fast in RMan either, especially when combined with hair. I don't know how 3Deight would behave in such a scenario since there is no button to try it out :-)
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