Hello blender world!
This is a question for those Cycles nerds out there. I know very little about cycles, and I am trying to learn more and more.
I have been recently trying to switch from the internal render system to Cycles. Now, I realize cycles’ strengths when it comes to stuff like architectural or industrial visualization, but I come from the world of animation, which often requires more tricks and workarounds, most of which cycles does not have yet.
Case in point: I was trying to light a scene in cycles using bounced lighting. Now ignore the noise of the renders… while a problem, that’s the not point of this post.
This is an example scene I will be using to demonstrate my problem. The scene is lit from a single sun lamp directly above, through a small whole in the ceiling of the cube. Rendered with a sun power of 3:
Which is pretty unusable. Now in Blender Render, I would use a handy feature called indirect lighting, that while completely inaccurate and fake, has a lot more control. I could simply boost the indirect lighting feature to 8 or 10, or something ridiculous.
I next tried boosting the sun lamp to a high power. This is the same render with a sun power of 100:
Now besides the noise, this is a lot closer to what I’m looking for. The problem here, of course, is that the white spot where the sun actually is hitting the ground is a white peak on the image, reaching values past 15-16, which creates a huge frustration for compositing.
Now an obvious solution would be to set another lamp, at low values, where the sun lamp hits the ground.
This gives an image much closer to what I’m trying to achieve, but unfortunately unusable for animation. It would be extremely difficult to animate the light moving around the scene, and the calculation would be sketchy.
So there’s my problem. Is there an easy way to boost the power of bounced lighting in cycles? Because it is an extremely important feature for animation.
Here is a ‘real world’ example of this problem. Cycles vs Blender internal with Indirect lighting. Pay attention to the bounced light on his face.
So as you can tell, this is a bit of a problem, especially for animation. Is there an obvious solution to this problem that I am missing, or is just that Cycles will need a bit of time before it is actually adaptable for full projects?
SUMMARY: Does Cycles have a controllable boost for bounced lighting, similar to the ‘factor’ control in Blender Internal’s indirect lighting? Because it if doesn’t, it needs one.
I’m interested in finding a solution to this problem, so thanks for your time reading this longer post!