Direct lighting vs PathTracing

[Lightray]

Here are two sample renders done with Octane for Poser 2012 and you can be the judge. The direct lighting shot took only 5 minutes, the Pathtracing shot took over 40 minutes. Saving time is sometimes worth the little decline in quality you get with Direct Lighting. I would love it if the time to render wasn't as high on the path tracing, but I can live with it for some things. Wide shots don't need to be as detailed, for example, and if the model is not seen for very long, you can always get away with the shot looking slightly less quality. This model was also heavy on the transmissions from the consoles screens, thus the renders took a bit longer than most. When the model has emissions like this, it tends to weigh the processor down, thus a slower speed.

Having the software only a week, I'm getting the feel of it and I think it was a wise choice for my workflow.

[face_off]

Wow - they are really quite different! For path tracing, if you set the hotpixel_removal to 0, and add some caustic_blur, you'll get much faster results. Despite the the increased emphasis on the direct lighting model, I still prefer the path tracing version. On path tracing I generally tweak the saturation (anywhere from 0.8 to 1.2), decrease the gamma to 0.8 and increase the exposure (to maybe 1.2) - that brings a bit more contract to the scene. And on path tracing, if you can get the speed from the hotpixel_removal and caustic_blur, it might be worth increasing the emissions for more contrast.

Paul

[face_off]

EDIT: and back to your lighting thread - a HDR image is not going to help in this scene (unless it's lighting the scene from behind the camera) - in which case you would need a mirrorball image - but that's getting out of my field of knowledge. IMO you are better off with a couple of emitter in the roof, plus lights from the screen emissions.

Paul

[Lightray]

I did make the lights of the model into emitters. The results were mixed. I could see the effect but the lighting was too harsh and I had to tone it down a bit.