mental ray Workflows in Softimage: Global Illumination

What you'll learn

In this series of lessons, we will learn how mental ray uses global illumination to simulate indirect light bouncing within Softimage. In the world around us, much of the light that we perceive comes from indirect illumination, or light that bounces off other surfaces to illuminate our surroundings. One of the ways that mental ray allows us to incorporate realistic light bouncing into our rendered images is to use global illumination. We will begin this course by learning about the underlying principles of global illumination, and how it relies on photons to calculate the lighting result. From there, we will learn how to adjust photon emission values, incorporating final gather into our global illumination results, saving and re-using global illumination data, override rendered photon results using the render tree, and many other lessons dedicated to explaining the various features and parameters used to control the global illumination result. By the time you complete this course, you will have a much stronger understanding of the underlying principles of global illumination, as well as a better understanding of some the common global illumination pitfalls, limitations, and their solutions. Software required: Softimage 2010 or higher required for project files.

Table of contents