rendering/lighting question

# 1 07-01-2007 , 09:23 PM

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Join Date: Dec 2006

Posts: 72

Guys/Girls,

I'm in the process of building a test set for my final year project at uni.

The whole thing is set in a lift, so I wanted to build the set by using a polygon and reversing the normals, so the cube is inside out.

My scene will include a fair bit of lighting - and at the time of writing, I'm looking at about 3/4 cameras set up in different locations in the lift.

This is where yet another n00b questions comes into play
When rendering a camera, will it render what's not visible to the camera's lens? For example, my lift will have a fairly complex button system, but won't be on show for many of the shots, so when rendering a camera that's not displaying this, will it calculate it's texture and lighting? If so, is there a way so turn this off when it's not in the render view?

My second question regards the reverse poly cube that I want to fashion into my set: If I apply global illumination to my scene, will it be shown inside the poly cube???

Thanks for reading...

James

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# 2 08-01-2007 , 05:28 AM

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Join Date: Oct 2006

Location: Melbourne

Posts: 313

James,

As far as I know, all clipping is done before the texture and lighting calcs. If the polygon (either the ones you've drawn, or the ones the object is converted to at render time, in the case of nurbs/subds) isn't visible then that's it for the polygon, no more time wasting calcs are performed.

Just checked, yep - it does work like this. I rendered a scene in 2 1/2 mins, then zoomed in on a tiny fraction of this scene and re-rendered. This time it took 1 min. In the second shot there were 2 - 3 times as many pixels being coloured (textured/lit) and it stil took 2/5ths of the time.

As for GI, not sure. It's not something I've delved into yet. If there was a setting for 2 sided lighting or something like that, it is probably there that you could control this.

Simon.

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