Not a clay render

Just goofing around with low level light groupings following along from my previous tests with fake GI skylight.

Unfortunately, I’m not good enough to hack in some runtime light array generation into light.exe, but I got around that by just placing 24 lights in a roughly spherical shape in the center of the room, all with a brightness of 5.

The accumulated shadows give a little more depth than a single light would, even with aguirre’s -soft option.  I think there could be something really cool in this.  Say, an editor keyval that tells light.exe to replace the single light with an array of lights to make effects similar to mental ray area lights.  You would have to account for dividing the light brightness across the replacement array and you could also factor a sort of ‘internal attenuation’ for each of the lights in the array such that array lights that were closer to the original light had more brightness, and those farther away less.

Note this was compiled with -fast, hence the jagged edges on the shadows.  Still, you can see that the shadow cast by the top most bridge is much fuzzier than what you’d normally get with -soft because -soft is limited to a certain sized based on lightmaps themselves. (I don’t really understand all the technical aspects of it, but this is what I recall aguirre telling me about it).

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