mental ray stories -Final Gathering- 25
 

Here we go. This rendering took about 3 hours time on my computer.

Default Production mode, with 1000 finalgather rays.
MinRad = 1 and MaxRad = 1

RESULT:
Looks good, although it is still grainy, but much better than the preview rendering.

Looking at the columns, the sampling can be improved by setting min samples to 1 or higher (warning: higher sampling takes much longer time to render if I recall correctly).

mental ray stories -Final Gathering- 26
 

hmmm I decreased the minrad to 0.1 with maxrad at 1, but it looks like it is more grainy than the minrad and maxrad 1 solution earlier.

Of course, the finalgather rays were never set higher than 200 in the previewfinalgather mode.

This lastest rendering took 35 minutes time to process.

I want to go back to my first solution with min- maxrad at 1 and 10, to see what the limits are when rendering with very high amount of finalgather rays.

I guess it would be nice to render out with these ray counts;
x4 4000 finalgather rays
x16 16000 finalgather rays
...just to see if the grainyness will go smooth out.

But I have just rented the movie Scorpion King on dvd, so I'll do the rendering later this evening. :)

just a suggestion, but maybe you can key the settings and let it batch render a whole series when you sleep.

anybody know what the difference between normal reflection and hdri reflection is?

I intend to do a render tonight while I sleep, to get that fantastic render quality. :)

I dont know much about hdri images, but I think such a file has a dynamic content that adjusts itself according to over- and under-exposure in renderings. I think hdri images keeps up the subtle contrasts when you say flood your scene with light.

mental ray stories -Final Gathering- 27
 

RESULT:
This is quite nice I think. I'm not sure how a high min- and max-radius affect the rendering of smaller objects, but I guess cranking up the finalgather rays alone gives some very decent results.

This rendering had minrad at 1 and maxrad at 10.
Finalgather rays was set to 4000.

I'll do a 16000 ray render in my next post.

i wonder what you will be able to do if you change the lighting to something more complex then a sphere, or if you let the sphere lit by global illumination and then make the final gather.

amazing stuff already - but one question:
i know you have some knowledge about architecture, did you learn lighting there as well? or do you learn it with trial and error now ??

now put all together and write a tutorial. Very nice iniciative. Keep going.

BabyDuck:
We learned something about light, by painting exercises. About sunlight and and the diffuse bluish light from the sky.

Global Illumination works with FinalGather, there may be a way to combine both, in a time saving manner. I'll try that later.

Oh, and started a renderjob before I got to sleep. I set the finalgather rays to 20000, and it only got to about 17% before I decided to abort the render. Seems like I should lower the ray count a bit :)

Rodi:
I want to make some summarizing out of all this. Just a little more experimentation and I'll get a little more wiser about all this.

mental ray stories -Final Gathering- 28
 

Oh, I just remembered that the minrad and maxrad setting can be automated. Simply set them to "0".

This pic is not the 16000 ray setting, but a 4000 with min- maxrad settings to "0".

Um, it looks nice, and renders a bit faster I think. Now I'm puzzled :).

RESULT:
The shading is different here. The diffuse is more smoothed out! Can you see it, compared to the former pic with 4000 finalgather rays?

mental ray stories -Final Gathering- 29
 

This is another rendering with automated min-maxrad settings. Which was set to "0" on both min and max.

Finalgather rays =16000

RESULT:
The small shadows beneath the big slabs in the center, has dissappeared with the automated min-maxrad function.

So I guess these are the things that has to be taken into concideration when fiddling with a speedy final gather solution.

hmmm! I wonder what Maya put into the min-maxrad here!?!

Although I raised the final gather rays from 4000 to 16000, I cannot see ANY change in quality.

Well I'll try the 16000 ray count on the earlier solution, with min- maxrad at 1 and 10.

mental ray stories -Final Gathering- 30
 

Ah, finally the 16000 ray render. This was with the PreviewFinalGather quality, with min- maxrad at 1 and 10 respectfully.

Now I like this pic, it doesnt have good sampling, but it tells me something about the settings I have worked with.

I have still the pleasure to render out a fantastic rendering with the production mode default values, with finalgather rays at 4000+, but it is no rush for me.

RESULT:
Well, the small but important shadows reappeared in this rendering, when the min-maxrad was set to other than "0".

I have been thinking, that I should also try to figure out what min- max rad is necessary for making the smaller shadows appear.

mental ray stories -Final Gathering- 31
 

I now want to figure out what "happens" when one of the two radius settings is set to "0" and the other to a 0+ value.

Here I used 1000 finalgather rays.
Minrad = 0
Maxrad = 10

RESULT:
The shadows I wanted appeared.

Next, I'll set the minrad to 1 and maxrad to 0.

mental ray stories -Final Gathering- 32
 

The shadows appeared this time also!

Minrad = 1
Maxrad = 0

mental ray stories -Final Gathering- 33
 

Now, this is interesting!

The diffuse seem to dissolve of sorts.

Minrad = 5
Maxrad = 0

Finalgather rays = 1000

mental ray stories -Final Gathering- 34
 

Yes, the shadow seems to dissolve.

Minrad = 8
Maxrad = 0

Finalgather rays = 1000