- Wed Jul 10, 2013 4:43 pm
#369238
Hello Jason,
I can not disagree more with your words.
There are certain "industry procedures" (or call it however you want) that doesn't break Maxwell's philosophy or its physical correctness.
If you want to be more purist, you shouldn't use Bump mapping nor Normal mapping, but you should model until the latest bit of your object (up to its microgeometry).
You shouldn't use HDRI maps to light an scene, as you would call it a "fake" as well. Instead, you should model the whole city all around you, to get the reflections and illumination coming from all around. But we are in an industry, and there are some usual procedures used to gain productivity, like Bump mapping or HDRI lighting.
And placing emitters with the right color to reinforce some emitters that are difficult to impact is not a fake at all, but a usual procedure photographers use everyday to push up the light sources and allow reducing the film ISO, thus reducing the noise.
And this is the same concept applied in Maxwell to get less noise in the same render time.
Believe me that we are really really picky with what we incorporate into Maxwell, and that we preserve Maxwell's correctness as our more precious treasure.
Of course we don't consider any of these procedures a fake. When we talk about fakes in CG we all know what we are talking about: cutting bounces, tweaking the rays, faking global illumination... All those tricks created to make light not behave like real light, or the camera not working like a real camera, just to gain speed.
Putting emitters behind a window like a photographer does won't break Maxwell to work like a real camera in any way, or to calculate the lights like real lights.
If you want to be purist you could avoid any secondary emitter, and render only with the indirect light coming from the sky. Of course you will get the correct result, a replica of the real scene, but reaching unaccessible emitters is hard (in ray calculations) thus the render will be noisy and slow, and people don't like noise. So, what do you want?
And of course, keep in mind that the first thing in our heads is, since the beginning, is to find algorithms that solve the paths faster maintaining the physical correctness of the result.
Everyday we work in that line. We got a huge improvement in Maxwell v2, and will get more improvements in the future versions. Just keep in mind that we work hard to solve the algorithm faster rather than implementing any other features.
Greetings
Dario Lanza
Next Limit Team