Hi guys, I'm working on my thesis about Houdini lighting right now. I read some tutorials about Global Illumination (PQ on vimeo) and am wondering how G.I. in Houdini is used in the industry. Do they use traditional spot lights to fake it, or so they use custom tool for that light effect? Who are using it and what movies they used it in?

i'm just curious to see your thesis

Latley I started bruteforcing everything with pbr

It work like a charm, but you need a lot of cpu! But with a good workstation PBR is AWESOM-O !

we've been using PBR for most renders, seems to be the way forward

jason

Unfortunately Houdini doesn't have good fast faking solution for GI (like vray or mental ray)
Irradiance cache is the way which can be useful in some scenes, but interiors can be rendered only by PBR and it tooks a lot of time

evgen
Unfortunately Houdini doesn't have good fast faking solution for GI (like vray or mental ray)
Irradiance cache is the way which can be useful in some scenes, but interiors can be rendered only by PBR and it tooks a lot of time

lol wut

lol wut wut.

PBR all theway. We are no big studio but mid sized house and mostly PBR and micropolygon rendering for volume.

Photon mapping is the only acceleration scheme for PBR – which can save you up to 50% of your render time, depending on the scene you're rendering.

After this you must manage the complexity of the scene yourself to get speed-ups. Manage reflection masks, light active-radii, model resolutions, even baking off diffuse surfaces using the “UV Render” capability on Mantra.

Hey guys, I'm back. Thanks for the discussion. I've been developing the topic and so far it narrows down to “lighting large scale landscape by decompositing with mantra”. I know people have been using PBR and having very satisfying result for interior scenes. But as for large exterior, has anyone been using it too? What you guys think about the level of difficulty of this for a master thesis?

But as for large exterior, has anyone been using it too? What you guys think about the level of difficulty of this for a master thesis

Ive worked on a film using irradiance on scene scales of 10kilometers > rendered fine. To be honest your thesis sounds like you will be just going over old ground all the methods are there and they all work in certain situations.

My suggestion for your thesis title should be “ Has the art gone out of vfx ”

Rob