Raytracing Quality (tab)

Video captions: Open Render Settings and select the Raytracing Quality tab. Select Precomputed + Shadows from the Interactive menu and Full Global Illumination from the Stillframe menu. Activate Raytracing in the toolbar. You are in the interactive rendering mode, as long as you do not activate the Antialias button. If you don’t use the mouse, you are in stillframe mode when you activate antialiasing. As soon as you cease navigation, VREd will automatically switch to the stillframe mode and start smoothing the rendering. You can, therefore, define several illumination modes for interactive and stillframe. For example, if you want to move with interactive frame rates, use Precomputed Illumination mode. If you want to finish your navigation in order to look at your scene from a specific perspective to see real shadows, use Precomputed + Shadows mode. If you want to export any images via rendering, you have to use the stillframe settings.

Video captions: Open Render Settings and select the Raytracing Quality tab. Please select Precomputed Illumination as the illumination mode in Interactive. Activate Raytracing in the toolbar. As you can see, there is no change to the main look of the scene. In the mode, Precomputed Illumination, HDR is still set as basic lighting. Besides, ambient occlusion is also still used for shading. Now, real reflections and refractions of the scene are used. Open the Material Editor and change your default environment to Is Visible. You can now see the default material on the sky dome geometry used in your scene. Open the Scenegraph and hide the sky dome geometry. All the specular mirrorings in the surrounding areas will disappear. This suggests you should work with a surrounding geometry in raytracing. When working with surrounding geometry, no interactive feedback is displayed. During the transformations of your objects, you can see an interactive update in specular mirrorings. Precomputed illumination is the fastest raytracing illumination mode within VRED.

Video captions: Open Render Settings and select the Raytracing Quality tab. Select Precomputed + as the illumination mode in Interactive. Activate Raytracing in the toolbar. In the Precomputed + Shadows mode, HDR is still the basic lighting. Also, real mirroring and reflections are used from the scene. No prepared ambient occlusion is used. Real shadows are calculated on the basic of HDR materials. Open the Material Editor and select the default environment to switch it to Is Visible. You need a surrounding geometry to see the reflections and shadowing of the HDR in your scene. You can now include another surrounding file. You will now see any modification of the shadow cast. Rotate the shadow material around the Z axis and see how the shadows change direction in syncope. Of course, the shadows are being calculated anew and interactively for every geometry. Use the illumination Precomputed + Shadows mode for excellent results with minimal render times.

Video captions: Open the Render Settings, via the Quick Access Bar. Choose as render mode, Precomputed + IBL. Activate Raytracing. HDR is not the lighting default. When hiding environments, the render view appears turns black. Real shadows of the scene are calculated. Furthermore, reflections and refractions are continued being calculated. Precomputed + IBL offers, in addition, the possibility to determine glossy reflections and respectively display them. Open the Material Editor, via the Quick Access Bar, and create a new plastic material. Change the color to black and set the Roughness to a value of 0.01. Apply the material to a geometry. Create any geometry and place it above your geometry. You can see the glossy reflections are being calculated. Switch the render mode to Precomputed + Shadows. As you can see, in the Precomputed + Shadow mode, no glossy reflections are generated.

Video captions: Open Render Settings and select the Raytracing Quality tab. Select Full Global Illumination mode from the Interactive menu. Activate Raytracing in the toolbar. In the Full Global Illumination mode, the complete scene will be calculated. Here you can find specular reflections, glossy reflections, refractions, direct shadow cast, and indirect lighting. Open the Material Editor and select the default environment to switch it to Is Visible. If you now hide the surrounding geometry, there will be no basic lighting in your scene. Use Full Global Illumination for best quality results.

Video captions: In the following, for the demonstration of photon tracing, we create a cube as a special environment. Open the Scene menu in the menu bar and create a box, via Create Geometry. If necessary, position the box with space around your object. Open the Render Settings, via the Quick Access Bar, and under Raytracing Quality, in the Illumination Mode section, in for Interactive and Still Frame, Full Global Illumination. The render view appears black, as the object is not being lit by any light source. All up the Light Editor, under Scene, in the main menu bar. With the help of the right mouse button, open the Light Editor context menu and create a new light source. Alter the type of the light in the Area Light section, under Shape, into a Sphere light. Increase the Intensity of the light to the value of 10 and scale your light source with the help of the Transform parameter, which you can call upon via the Quick Access Bar. Position the light source as you please. Open the Render Settings and select the Photo Tracing section. Under Mode, choose Indirect Only to enable photon tracing. Indirect lighting of the scene is exclusively displayed by photons. To demonstrate this, we switch the Mode from Full Global Illumination to Precomputed + IBL. As you can see, the only difference for the indirect lighting is the emitted photons. In Full GI, you additionally have glossy reflections. You, actually, only have indirect lighting where photons land. It’s important to strike a good balance between the number of photons and the radius to illuminate the whole scene. The optimal case in reality would be an infinite amount of photons with an infinitely small radius. As this is not possible, an estimation is attempted with values like count and radius to reach a satisfactory result. With Photon Radius, you can control the radius of a single photon. Activate Antialias. You can see that no noise-free image is generated. This signals that the balance between the count and the radius has not yet been found. Change the radius and the count of the photos respectively. By increasing the count and scaling the radius, more dark areas were able to be covered by photons, reducing the noise. You have the possibility to enable Use Automatic Photon Radius, to ensure that no dark areas appear in the image. Here, depending on the number of photons, the result can occasionally be falsified.

Video captions: Open the Scenegraph via the Quick Access Bar and pull up the Scenegraph menu with the help of the right mouse button menu. Create a material group. Subordinate it, via drag and drop, to your geometry. If necessary, open the Material Editor and create a new glass material. Change the exterior transparency of the material to a bluish color tone. As the refraction index, set a value of 1.2 and activate Solid Shadows. Assign the material, via drag and drop, to the material group. Create another material. This time, select a plastic material. Change the Diffuse Color to a darker color tone and give Roughness a value of 2. Assign the material to your floor plane. Select your environment HDR in the Material Editor, and in the color Correction section, set the exposure value to 0 to deactivate the HDR lighting in your scene. This is done for demonstration purposes to make caustics visible in our scene. Call upon, if necessary, the Light Editor in the Scene menu. Activate the light source that was set up in advance by selecting Enabled. To generate a new light source, select the plus symbol in the Light Editor and choose a type of light. Open the Render Settings, via the Quick Access Bar, and in the Raytracing Quality tab, open Illumination Mode to get to its settings. To get caustics to be displayed, Full Global Illumination is necessary as render mode. Expand the Photon Tracing section and choose, under Mode, Caustics + Indirect to activate photon tracing with caustics. Via Interactive Count, the number of expelled photons can be set. This parameter refers to the interactive rendering. Change the value to 500 000 to radiate this many photons. Move your geometry to make the created caustics recognizable on your floor plane. Raise the number of photons as you please to increase the display of the created caustics. For performance reasons, the number of photons is being reduced again. Select your light source with the help of the Scenegraph and move it as you please in your render view. Changes in the caustics through moving the light source are displayed interactively. Increase the intensity of the light source. Open the Render Settings and increase the photon count for interactive and still to one million. Stillframe Count defines the amount of photon used for the image computation process. Activate the antialiasing.

Video captions: In this case, a cube was created in advance, acting as spatial surroundings. In the main menu bar, open the Light Editor, under Scene. Activate the available light source necessary. Change the render mode with the help of the Render Settings to Full Global Illumination. Open the Photon Tracing section and select Indirect Only to activate photon tracing. For more information on photon tracing, look up the Photon Tracing tutorial. Set the number of photons to 500 000. In general, many photons are needed to illuminate a scene. Different color values and the impact of photons can cause noise in the image. To remedy this, Final Gather was added. Activate Final Gather by setting the final gather quality to a value between 1 and 4. Final Gather creates a radiance photon for every 8th photon. Via a radiance, the information from neighboring photons is collected and stored in a final gather map. Final Gather Radius defines the radius of this information gathering process from a radiance photon.

Video captions: Open Render Settings and select the Raytracing Quality tab. Select Precomputed + Shadows from the Interactive and Stillframe menus. Activate Raytracing in the toolbar. Open the Lightsource Sampling Quality section. Increase Interactive quality up to 2. You can immediately see a less noisy result in your interactive window. Activate Statistics in the toolbar. You can now quality the usage tradeoff due to increasing interactive samples. Switch back to quality 1 and compare the difference in the Current FPS (frames per second). You can, thus, weigh up whether you want to work in a performance or quality-oriented way.

Video captions: Open Render Settings and select the Raytracing Quality tab. Select Precomputed Illumination as the Interactive and Stillframe modes. Activate Raytracing in the toolbar. Open the Material Editor. Select the tire geometry in the render window, in order to see the material properties. Open the raytracing section. Activate the function, Override Illumination Mode, select Precomputed + IBL for both the interactive and stillframe modes. Now your scene will be calculated in Precomputed Illumination and the tire material in Precomputed + IBL. This means that glossy reflections and correct shadowing will be visible on the tire. Select Shadow Material. Open the Raytracing section. Activate the function, Override Illumination Mode, select Precomputed + Shadows for both the interactive and stillframe modes. Now, shadows will always be calculated in the Precomputed + Shadows mode. Activate the function, Override Shadow Sampling Quality and select setting 2 for interactive and stillframe quality. Now, shadows will be calculated in higher quality. Play around with the several render modes and settings to achieve the optimal quality and performance for you.