3Delight for Maya | GI effects

Ok, so you probably know how to get proper GI effects using point clouds, right? If that's not the case or you think it is a bit hard to set up, then you have to take a look at the new GI tab in 3Delight for Maya 6.0.

First, you need this scene:

some spheres and a light.

Now, create a render pass and render that scene with default values and persp camera. You'll get this fantastic image in i-display:

Notice the value on gamma correction (Yeah, otherwise it looks "dark", right?).

Well, now let's put some magic there. Select the render pass and open the attribute editor. Go to "Global Illumination" section, open and select "Point-Based Full Global Illumination" from the "Effect" drop down menu:

Ok, now let's render again!. It will take a few more seconds because it is writing the point cloud file. After that, you'll get this:

That's great, isn't it? We didn't use any volume/surface shaders or pre world mel!Ok, there's something in the shadowed areas that doesn't look great. It is because we are using 8 bits to display this, let's change that and render again (we will be using multi layered exrs to render this, anyway ;) ).

For the next render, I've increased the "Color Bleeding Intensity" from 1 to 3:

That was easy, fast and looks rad!

I won't spoil the fun with boring stuff but it is a good idea to read the fucking manual, which is very complete and will help you get nice renders in time.

peace

ahh I forgot to tell you that you can actually take a look at the point cloud file. It is located in the 3delight//pointClouds folder where the project is located. This is how the point cloud file looks like: