Photonmap on Photoworks???????

[Magicblack]

What is Photonmap in photoworks?

When i render an object it says 'building Phonomap' in the loading box and it taks a very long time to render for some reason?

Can anyone tell me what it is and why it causes my renderings to take so long to actually render?

 

[Theophilus]

Yes. That's a piece of using indirect (and maybe global) lighting. If you look at some renderings using low settings for indirect lighting, you'll notice in some of the more shadowed areas little dots of light. These dots represent the "photon" (or light) pattern of indirect light bounced onto the geometry of your model or scene. The pattern of dots (as best I can tell) is the photon map. Because all this light has been bounced from another source (and is not coming directly from a light), long calculations involving materials and environment are necessary.

So, the indirect lighting calculations take a lot of juice to process. I recommend using test renderings with low settings until you're fairly certain you have your materials and lighting adjusted properly, and then turning the settings up to optimal rendering levels for your final rendering (saves a lot of time). The final rendering can take a long time.

I recently had a reflective object in a reflective environment with indirect lighting and shadow quality turned up quite high that took over 20 minutes to render (and I have an AMD FX-60!). So the great stuff will take a little longer if you have complicated scenery/materials.

Jeff Mowry

http://www.industrialdesignhaus.com

Reason trumps all. And awe trumps reason.