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The New Ambient Lighting

January 28th, 2011

Thanks for taking part in the poll, now things become a bit clearer. Let me start explaining the differences between the two rendering engines.

First of all, the lighting. As some noticed, the new engine produced too “white” images, while the old one renders more “volume” ones. This is because of changes in the ambient occlusion algorithm. The old one gathers lighting from the top half of sphere and doesn’t limit the distance to the possible occluders.

As you may see, the top face receives all the possible light from the sky, while the side faces receive only a half or even less. Finally, as we don’t look at the bottom half of the sphere, the side faces doesn’t get darkened because of the floor. The rounded spine of the top book from the poll receives more lighting where it looks to the top and less lighting where it doesn’t. This works well for the spine, but the side of the set of leaves looks too gray for me.

Here is the simple box rendered using the old engine.

The new rendering engine gathers lighting from the whole sphere and doesn’t care about the occluders that are too far.

This leads to more correct ambient lighting, but doesn’t darken sides at all if there are no occluders near. Well, actually if you put the orange box to the completely white room, you probably will see the similar effect

The shadow became smaller as it now depends on the distance to the occluder. Longer shadows on the floor means longer shadows on the box as well, so I have to find something in the middle. There is a “Contrast” option that allows to make the shadow more visible.

As there are some requests to keep the old lighting as well, I’ll try to implement both methods, so the user may choose what to use. I haven’t tried this yet, but I don’t think that it will be difficult with the new engine. Just need to figure out how to control both lighting methods by the same set of options.

Now please let me know what do you think about this

P.S.: In the next post I am going to describe the difference between the top three images in the poll.

P.P.S: I can’t yet say when this will be released. Still have to finish the new engine and fix some errors. Give me about a month, please

Update

As expected, the old skydome lighting works quite well with the new engine. It even runs a bit faster, as it is possible to avoid the tracing of some rays.

Any other suggestions?

Your Comments:

1.	Glenboid January 28th, 2011 at 8:00 pm
	WOW! Very excited about this release!
2.	Sebastien January 28th, 2011 at 8:31 pm
	Boxshot3D is a great application. However, there is one thing unrealistic in the old lighting engine : ambient lighting throwing shadows of the object on the side lit by the stronger direct light. Will this be corrected in the new engine ?
3.	Vitaly [Box Shot 3D]  [+] January 28th, 2011 at 9:02 pm
	Glenboid, me too Sebastien, I know. I’ve already tried to implement the physically-correct lighting, but the skylight-specific corner shadows don’t look so sexy in that case. Probably I’ll write a post about this a bit later – there are lots of nuances there.
4.	Michel Mendes  [+] January 29th, 2011 at 11:21 pm
	Hi Vitaly, I appreciate your effort to bring a faster render algorythm to BoxShot 3D, but I definitively prefer the real look results of the old one… Please, keep the old engine if possible !!! Regards
5.	Michel Mendes  [+] January 29th, 2011 at 11:26 pm
	Perhaps new engine can reach realistic results when BoxShot 3D will use multiple objects. I think that multiple object rendering is the main priority to this amazing program. What do you think about it folks?
6.	Vitaly [Box Shot 3D]  [+] January 30th, 2011 at 6:29 pm
	Michel Mendes, see the “Update” section above
7.	Michel Mendes  [+] January 30th, 2011 at 6:58 pm
	Very, very cool! Same quality as usual but in less time… Congratulations!
8.	Mike February 7th, 2011 at 6:08 am
	Great work but how about a temporary release or would that make no sense? I was told mid-December 2010 that: “I am going to release it by the end of this year”… can’t wait!
9.	Vitaly [Box Shot 3D]  [+] February 8th, 2011 at 2:19 pm
	Mike, you’re absolutely right Unfortunately, there is a chain of changes that doesn’t allow to release something stable until all the rings are finished… I am going to show a beta quite soon. Stay tuned.
10.	Mike February 9th, 2011 at 2:44 am
	Great – it takes time to make good products Looking forward to the beta release.

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