hundreds of tiny fake lights .....

[ltchest]

.......First time using Octane since it was in Beta
Im having fun with it on a current project, but just wondering, I currently have close to 1,000 tiny little emitters in the scene
and am wondering if there is a better way to do it. The idea is to have wood cladding panels with tiny holes cut into them & showing
a light source that is behind the wood panels. Currently, I just made simple planar circle meshes & placed them all about 1mm in front of the wood panels with a very low power blackbody emitter material (power = 0.1, distribution = 0.05, efficiency = 0.2).
The overall effect in the rendering is OK (sort of ok) but it must be very inefficient. What would be the best way to do this ?
The panels are not seen close up.

Also same kind of question with LCD tv's that i have hanging on the wall. If i want them to glow like real tv, but not slow down the render too much, whats the best technique ? currently I have the TV screen texture in the diffuse slot & also same texture map in the "texture emission" slot (power 0.12)

Thx

[Olitech]

To make it more efficient, you should probably try to use an opacity map for your ceiling holes, then use a large Planar light above the ceiling for the lights.

Alternatively, you could copy the ceiling geometry directly above itself and make it an emitter so that it shines through the holes.

best,
O

[ltchest]

thanks for the reply ! my thoughts on that were that putting a giant light directly behind a piece of geometry is not good with an unbiased renderer like octane. maybe it doesnt matter with pmc, im not sure. Anyhow, the scene is not terribly bad - if i am using PMC i can get a good enough image in about 2 hours (1600px x 1600px). I need to render at about double that resolution, so it'll be the kind of thing that has to cook overnight...

[roeland]

Using an emitter in every hole is definitely more efficient. If you use a large plane, most light samples will be blocked by the wood, and instead of light you will just see a few fireflies from samples which happen to go through the holes.

For the TV using a texture emission with the image as texture is the way to go, but you should just a constant dark gray or black color in the diffuse slot, and then adjust the power of the emitter until you see the image.

--
Roeland

[Olitech]

Very good to know!

Thanks!

best,
O

[ltchest]

thanks for confirming Roeland.
With this scene i am getting a render of 3000px x 3000px done in about 12 hours. At 13000 samples, the image is clean enough.