Concept Art

A piece of concept art I did over the weekend. It's a paint over piece, the source for which can be seen below. The source was rendered in Mental Ray with the indirect lighting generated by my app.

More realtime tests

The street scene running in the realtime renderer. The diffuse and specular textures have all been thrown on really quickly.

... and some more random dynamic lights ...

Realtime tests

Thought I'd blow the dust off an old render engine I was working on to test the lightmaps I've been generating. The scene's pretty basic but the lightmap (1024^2) is working well I think. I'll post some more complex scenes soon.

The old engine was a light pre pass type renderer so here's the scene rendered with 64 dynamic point lights. I also baked an ambient occlusion map to help modulate the lighting.

Arrival

A slight change from the usual lightmap tool updates, thought I'd post some test renders for a personal project I've been developing. It's early days yet so for now I'll let the pictures do the talking :)

Mental Ray comparison

I've been meaning to compare lightmap render times with mental ray for quite a while so here are the results for a 1024^2 lightmap. An example of the test scene can be seen in this post.  Direct and indirect light were calculated but I've only shown indirect light below.

Max 2010 / Mental Ray: 28 minutes

Settings: 

Final Gather set to 'High' preset with 1 diffuse bounce.

Lanczos filtering with 1 / 16 samples.

Logarithmic exposure control

Lit with mental ray sun / sky system

My app: 1 minute 30 seconds

Settings: 

3 bounces (total of  roughly 9000 rays per sample point)

 Lit with 1 directional light and HDR environment probe.

System specs.

Vista 64bit 

4gb ram

Intel Core 2 Duo E6850 @ 3.0ghz

Geforce 8800 gtx w/768mb ram

More renders

An update to yesterdays post, the lightmaps used in these shots were generated by my app and then rendered with mental ray. As before, no GI was used in max and the scene is lit with seven 1024^2 lightmaps. I haven't distributed the texel density of the scene very well so the shadow detail on the street / building surfaces suffers.

Lightmaps rendered in 3ds max

I thought I'd see how the lightmaps generated by my app look rendered in 3ds max. I used mental ray as the renderer but disabled final gather and global illumination. The light map is 2048^2 and took about a minute to render.

Environment test II

I've added some more detail to my exterior test scene, here are the results. The scene is lit by seven 1024 x 1024 light maps.

The lightmap shown covers the street and building geometry.

1st pass direct light, 464 subsurface samples and 464 final gather samples (52 seconds)

2nd pass 464 fg samples (23 seconds)

3rd pass 4454 fg samples (3 minutes 34 seconds)

1st pass direct light and 464 final gather samples (35 seconds)

2nd pass 464 fg samples (22 seconds)

3rd pass 4454 fg samples (3 minutes 30 seconds)