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Optimizing Fibre Optic Lighting in a Tunnel Scene
Hi Guys
In my project, I have a camera attached to a spline rail travelling through a mine shaft.
The mineshaft is illuminated by long fibre-optic cables that evenly spread around it’s circumference.
I am pressed for time and know that the simple option (to use global illumination) is a bad idea.
Instead, I have cloned omni-lights along the fibre-optic cable splines throughout the length of the tunnel – this is greatly increasing my render times too – there has to be way over 1000 lights now!
I have tried solving this by using a plain effector as a child to my camera to create a light intensity falloff from the camera, but still it is taking ages… I think C4D is still trying to calculate ALL of the light values and shadow maps…
I think that what I need is an effector that simply enables / disables the cloned lights within the falloff, as in, literally, making them exist / not exist.
This way, as the camera passes through the tunnel only a set amount of lights will have to be calculated in one area.
I’ve attached the project file for you to take a look at and would greatly appreciate some help!
Best,
Hayden -
4 Replies
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NOTE:
I have tried using an area light aligned to the fibre-optic splines but the sample count max value of 1000 is too low.
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I’m seeing much shorter render times with GI – turning off the lights (and the default light). I’ve tried a bunch of GI settings and it looks pretty good, though I have nothing to compare it too as I have not let the “Rendering Shadow Maps” even finish (still going at 1/2 an hour even after I lowered the shadow map size to 250×250) – of course I’m rendering the viewport so it’s not as big as your 2000×2000 renders which would stretch the GI times but the shadow calculations would be independent of render size, so… still, you might want to look at GI as it could be quicker than that many lights.
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What if I managed to bake the GI? Then surely I could get by this thing more easily – no lights would be needed at all!
Hmmm, Brian, do you think this could work?
I’m a little unfamiliar with baking GI and would find it handy if you could show me how
Many thanks for the quick feedback!
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don’t know about baking the GI, I don’t have that much experience myself but with the size of your object the texture would have to be enormous to get good results (I think you might not be able to make it large enough but wiser heads might know different). if the tunnel sections are all identical you could clone those and maybe it would work or do it in poly selections…
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