Hi,

I've been trying to create a lightbulb like effect using final gather and gi.

In the scene, there is a lamp, containing a bulb (just a lambert sphere) with incandescence (I've tried it with ambient colour too). There is a sphere containing the lamp.

The image shows the result I get. Tweaking settings, I get variations on this, though I don't get the kind of light bounce I hoped for. Couple of questions:

1) Will global illumination only work with a light actually emitting photons? I mean, it won't bounce light around if it's cast from an object acting as a light source?

2) How would you create a bulb in a setting such as this? I wanted to see what a scene looked like from a single light source, but with it's rays being bounced around the scene.

3) To make a lamp shade appear to have thickness, would you actually extrude the surface to give it depth, or is there a setting that can fake this? (with a brighter setting in this scene it is quite obvious it is a wafer thin surface).

4) Why is it that I can see the back surface colour of the shade, but not the surface closest to the camera? the shade has a high translucency setting but a very low transparency setting.
cheers,

gubar