Provides physically accurate lighting and effects for advanced visual quality and realism. The sunlight parameters allow positioning using latitude, longitude and time-of-day for accurate shadow studies, plus physically accurate rendering of sky hemispheres.
LightWorks Advanced Lighting supports the interaction of light beams with particles in the atmosphere, e.g. dust particles in a room, or water drops in fog. It provides high-performance area lights with soft-edged shadows, plus goniometric and area-goniometric lights. It also provides unique perceptual tone mapping for mapping high-dynamic brightness range output for display, using a mechanism that accurately simulates the response of the human eye.
Features
- Area lights that give soft-edged shadows that vary accurately depending on the distance from the object to the shadow receiver. Area light calculations are accelerated using our unique caching mechanism that gives users higher image quality faster than other renderers.
- LightWorks Advanced Lighting gives users the ability to specify lights using data files supplied by lighting manufacturers that accurately define the shape and brightness of the lamp output. Additionally, it uniquely gives users the ability to specify area goniometric lights - a step up in realism from other renderers that only support point goniometric lights approximations.
- Perceptual tone mapping ensures that scenes rendered using physically accurate lighting specifications appear as the human eye sees them. Physically accurate lighting specifications result in images containing very high-dynamic brightness ranges, which need to be converted into the fixed dynamic range of today's display technology before the user can view them. Other renderers use simple range-mapping calculations that result in images that are inaccurate. However, the unique perceptual tone mapping in LightWorks Advanced Lighting maps the brightness data using a mechanism that accurately simulates how the human eye responds to high-dynamic brightness ranges, giving users more accurately images faster.
- As well as providing the most accurate mechanisms to define and simulate high-dynamic brightness range lighting, LightWorks Advanced Lighting also supports the interaction of light with particles in the atmosphere, for example dust particles in a room, or water drops in fog. This goes beyond the 'pretty pictures' that can be produced by some other renderers, because LightWorks Advanced Lighting uses a physically accurate calculation of the interaction of the light photons with the particles in the atmosphere, including Mie, Rayleigh and Henyey Greenstein scattering functions.
- LightWorks Advanced Lighting supports HDRI (high dynamic range images), for use in image-based lighting. This lets users create more accurate images significantly faster. It allows a high dynamic range image to be used as a light source, as an alternative to complicated lighting set-ups involving large numbers of individual lights, and allows lighting to be perfectly matched to background images and environments. HDRI is provided by the OpenEXR and HDR image format drivers plus a new “environment light” light shader.