Radiosity lightning

Does anyone know is there available freeware/low-cost radiosity lightning
plug-ins for 3d Studio Max(3) ?

Renderings just look so plastic/arficifial without a good rendering/lightning tool...

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* Radok *

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Monkey Sea Entertainment
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Moviemakers Portal (moviemaking-only search engine)

About radiosity rendering.. I think it depents a lot of what you're doing. If you've to render a single object it won't be a big deal (well.. this depents too) but the difference between default-rendering (with raytrace or not) and radiosity-rendering is quite noticeable if you're planning to render whole background-environment for the scene. For example these pics: (1st one normal rendering, 2nd radiosity)

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* Radok *

and concerning the original question.
check www.bmrt.org. it´s a freeware implementation of the renderman standard incl radiosity.
wont get up the original PrMAN, but free. my personal favourite is mental ray. althought arnold (now part of messiah render) will be ported to max too, and will prolly rock for dome-lightning scenes.

a) a link to show ya the "real" deal :
http://www.3dluvr.com/marcosss/

be sure to watch ALL PICS. and if you got the bandwidth ALL ANIMS. there´s some of the coolest dome-light-style scenes there are.

b) VERY IMPORTANT.

if your renders look very artificial, it´s your fault, not max´s :P .
No seriously. you can achieve VERY GOOD quality with max standard render (even better since you are using max 3 wich is a lot better then max2.5).

it´s a lot of work, and there´s lot´s too learn, but POSSIBLE. and if someone is really good at texturing and lightning, those pure max-pics are mostly looking a lot better then the most of the radiosity-pics, cuz many ppl tend to rely too much on the tools, rather then creativity and knowledge.

I agree with you about that setting up lightning thing. You can get very good results without radiosity if the scene lights are placed right and the textures
are adjusted correctly. I don't know much
about new rendering/lightning methods of 3dsMax3 (I do know methods of v2.5 though) and so there is of course always room for improvement what comes to lightning.

I checked again those examplepics I put here before. Those pics do not tell the whole thruth about differences between "regular" and "radiosity". (I noticed that it's not even the same scene! ) So.. There's a better example in NewTek's site (http://www.newtek.com), under Lightwave6.0 section: Check that Wolksvagen out.

Those "real" deals were modelled gr8! But what I meant by saying that it's not so important to use radiosity in a single object was this: Radiosity's mainidea (tell me if I'm wrong!) is to reflect light from all objects (so that the object's selfcolor is reflected to the rest environment) and if there's only one object, radiosity is not required (or not even recommended in some cases). And most of the pics in URL http://www.3dluvr.com/marcosss/ didn't have nothing but a gray or white background and one or two objects in scene so the dome-lightning was the right choise in this case. (Even if most of the models did look too much computer-generated, IMHO of course )

But as you said: Creativity and knowledge comes first. After you're satisfied with your work you can try to make it more realistic by adding extra things like radiosity. I've just heard and saw so
much good results made with radiosity, so I wanted to try it too. I'll tell or show the results in near future.

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* Radok *

the way you can accomplish the same results like in arnold in mental ray for example is to set up a scene, and get the lighting from ONE area light (wich is a dome-mesh created around the scene). that gives (in conjunction with Final Gather and Global illumination) those cool results, wich simply look more real, as the there´s actual diffuse lightning.

check here to see a fast and not really good example to show what i mean :
http://bts.ovh.org/folio/imageFolio.cgi?action=view&link=NiatPac&image=HEAD2.jpg&img=&tt=img

it is only the mesh of the head, a floor-plane, and a dome (invisible) surrounding it. ONE Area-light and ONE omni light (for the shadow only) was used in this example. it rendered in about 2.5 mins. and well, the modell is bad, quality is poor, but i think you can get the idea. i think the lighting and the surface look a LOT more plastic, the if you would have rendered the same texture-less scene with the standard raytracer.

dropping in on your conversation for a minute...

Here's a couple questions:

1) Does using radiosity give an visible improvement to renders?
2) I'm not familiar with "dome lightning". Is it possible to do this in Blender, offhand?
3) Any other lighting hints besides the ones mentioned?

Thanks from a novice,

Ghang!

dome lighting is not really useful without radiosity. you could do it by hand tho. built the dome (hemisphere). then put an omni-light to each vertex. it gives better day-light-style renders. but is a hell of a work. for 3d-Max, there´s a script creating that kinda stuff easily and fast. it´s free on boboland.

considering lighting i would suggest reading some good books. there are special books on cgi-lightning. but material on film-lighting can give you very good help too. basically a 3d scene is a virtual set.

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