isoyann wrote:"One of theses feature is the ability to texture the ray color exit of the GI."
Is that some type of light map? Final gather map?
Not really.. using distance clipping, the GI light will only shoots rays in a max range of 1 meter for example (if you set the clipping to 1m). Above this distance, the rays hit nothing and return black. The ray color exit allows you to replace the black with any color, or texture it. Using a panoramic 360 small render (32x32 is enough) of your scene to texture it (in clarisse you can use any interactive render as a map) give you a very good approximation of the full GI render.
If you change the scene (move objects, add or change lights..) , the panoramic render will be re-rendered and used on the fly , here is an example which show this with a very saturated colored lighting, computed in 20 minutes (there is still noise in the 1 meter GI range because the sampling is too low, but the walls, illuminated mainly by the ray exit color, is clean.. ).
bedroom_clarisse1200sec par isoyann, sur Flickr
Isoyann, would you kindly tell a bit more of this setup?
For example:
1) Where did you place your panoramic camera?
2) I guess for the 32x32 render you created an additional lightset mimicking your scene setup but with real GI light?
3) How did you use the 32x32 image, specifically how did you map it to the light to make the lookup precicely match the panoramic render? In short: how did you make your GI light sample the 32x32 image correctly.
I'm very curious of this setup, because it looks like that, if set up correctly. you could use this approach to fake GI for distant or environment objects while using separate lightset and GI light for hero characters.
That would be so much better than my current workflow in which I use multiple point/area lights with their shadows disabled to fake diffuse GI irradiance to cut render time from hi-res animations to avoid using GI at all for environment objects.
If you don't have time to explain all of this, I'd be grateful if you could provide a scene file with this setup. I'm sure I'll figure it out =)