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Lighting Options
Six different renders for comparison sake. I decided to base this example on the beach probe .hdri. I postitioned the scene so that the light would come from behind to "back light" the scene to demonstrate the differnt shadow corrections possible. I first rendered the ibl example for the lighting angle, then I rendered all of the other examples to match the .hdr lighting angles for easy comparison. There is a big difference between ambient light and the ambient channel in bryce. "Ambient" is a real phenomenon, and that is what .hdr is, a photo of the light striking a silver ball from all sides to capture the ambient light of a real world situation and record it for reproduction in a scene. IBl and secondary lighting are the same idea, but with ibl there are alot more light sources involved. As you can clearly see the ambient channel alone as a shadow corrector is completely featureless and 2dimensional. The sky dome at leas gives us some countorus from above, but notice how the sides of the other objects remain dark and featureless. Notice sky dome comes from 90degrees when the sun is placed at just 14degrees. Sky dome does not follow the sun. The ibl version looks great even at this low quality. The traditional next to it lighting is designed to mimic the .hdr and does a much better job that the sky dome or the ambient channel did at faking the hdri effect. I have written many times about the ambient channel and sky dome why they fail to convince. They are flat compared to secondary lighting. Notice the .hdr is faked by using a single gold colored primary and a single blue colored secondary, just 2 lights in total!!! The .hdr version is indeed better, but the simple primary and secondary lights do a surprisingly good job of reproducing the same basic effect. I can render with transparency if I need to.
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Most instructive Rashad to see all these things laid out side by side. Maybe there is room for another catagory on the site? A "refference" section where images which deal with the technicalites of using bryce could be placed? 6.1 IBL is way ahead of 6.0. The quality value now indicates the number of simulated lights in use as opposed to an abstraction as was the case in the first release.
ah yes I should have mentioned that it was 6.0. I have a couple of renders going so I cannot restart the computer to fire up the 6.1 update. I am excited by the improvements I've bben told to expect in 6.1 in the ibl department. I felt that for this exercise 6.0 would be fine as my point was to illustrate the shortcomings of the ambient channel and the sky dome effects. Hopefully it is clearer. Gat, I have found that just a few lights are usually fine for a basic render. But producing soft shadows often is what requires alot of light sources. Even the ibl creates soft shadows by overlapping many lights. In the above example the ibl was faked with just two radial lights. Since the beach probe .hdri has a mountain on one side so the light from that region of the sky is blocked. Normally there would not be such a large obstruction to the light, but since there is, it can be taken advantage of. In most cases you will want 1 primary light source at north with a secondary at both east and west to illuminate from the side angles. Three lights total will do for most jobs.
. I think its 6.0 there is collor leaking on to the objects, and there are soft shadows even at quality of 1, which in 6.1 is 8 (or 16). What really sucks about bryce is the how far one can go setting up lights. If I was to place a light bellow the ground jus to light up those bottom adges it will give almost no better result then ambient chanell. They need to change the way lights behave in bryce, and add layers.
Thanks Thank you Rashad for your efforts. It has become a lot more clear.
Thanks for the comparison renders, Rashad. Your "fake" hdri at bottom right is an ibl simulation that is quite convincing. One question: is this Bryce 6.0 or Bryce 6.1 IBL. I ask this because it's about the same difference of living on the Moon or on Earth.