Global Illumination provides users with advanced technologies for calculating indirect illumination enabling accurate lighting simulation and increased realism. Global Illumination combines innovative hybrid-radiosity with final gather technologies to render realistic images at maximum speed while providing the ultimate in image quality.
Other global illumination renderers are notorious for being slow and difficult for the user to control. Our experience in creating rendering technology that is both practical for the user to use and also easy for application developers to integrate ensures that LightWorks Global Illumination leads the industry in performance and capabilities.
Radiosity
- Supports the export of global illumination calculations as a polygon mesh as well as programmatically querying the results, for passing directly to the application. This allows the application to provide users with a complete integrated authoring system for virtual world and games production.
- LightWorks Global Illumination goes beyond existing radiosity renderers by supporting multi-coloured area light sources, so that more subtle and realistic images are produced. Other radiosity renderers only support a single, flat colour for each surface, producing inaccurate images in many situations.
- Comprehensive, easy-to-use parameters allow radiosity solutions to be tailored to the applications' requirement whether that be lighting simulation, walkthrough or as input to a final gather calculation.
Final Gather
Final Gather is a technique that can be used with or without Radiosity and which will calculate the effects of diffuse secondary illumination (i.e. bounced light) in a scene. It involves computing the incoming illumination at various points in a scene and storing this data in a cache. Information stored in the cache is then used to determine how illumination from other parts of the scene contribute to the illumination at the point being shaded.
As this is achieved without the meshing issues associated with Radiosity there are 2 main benefits.
- A small number of easily understood controls drive the Final Gather process and therefore the User Interface can be very simple.
- Final Gather doesn't need to mesh the scene and therefore the render time is, to a large extent, independent of the size of the model.
In addition, the use of Final Gather can dramatically increase the speed of renderings using 'dome' lights i.e. Sky, Simple Sky and HDRI lighting. This is achieved by reducing the number of samples from the dome light and allowing Final Gather instead to determine the lighting levels in the scene. In a similar way, an inaccurate but fast Radiosity solution can be used as the input to Final Gather, leading to the creation of predictable, well-lit images.