New rendering Q

[smeggy]

Is it possible to use only self-illuminating geometry in a scene for lighting? I tried a few things and reducing the exposure base in the .XML until the lightmap was barely working was almost successful, but even after 1500 iterations it was very grainy. I also encase the scene in a hollow sphere,  mapped HDRI images on self -illuminated planes etc. All work to some degree. Ideally I want to use lamps. Overhead and table lamps with simulated light bulbs. It seems the area of them is a limiting factor. I had better luck with large planes than with small bulbs.

The main reason for asking this is that with a fully active render environment, the lamp effect gets completely lost in the overall light level

This is a mixture of low emission HDR plus a plane and bulb light.

[chengyun.yang]

Hi, 

The self-illumninating materials are something we target to deliver in Future Fusion releases as part of the Fusion apperance library enhancement. In the meantime, you can find some self-illuminating materials in the Legacy Autodesk apperance library(choose it from the library Dropdown list of the apperance dialog). The LED materials in the Pastic category are some typical examples of these materials. You can assign these materials in the scene and adjust the illuminance property value of them(e.g., change the default 100 to 10000) from the material editor dialog. 

Hopefully this is helpful for you

Chengyun Yang - Fusion graphics developer

[smeggy]

Yes, I was using the old library materials to illuminate the bulb and plane. The problem is how long it's taking to get a clean image. I was wondring if there was something I can do to speed up the cooking time. The results without the environment map is very noisy.