Timothy R. Cook <tim### [at] scifi-fantasycom> wrote:
> heh usually I just use 2x2 area lights...

  That's like not having area lights at all.

  I don't understand why people are so afraid of using really dense area
lights.
  Granted, they slow down the rendering a bit, but not that much (as long
as you are using adaptive sampling).

  The only place where denser area lights slow down the rendering are in
the penumbra (ie. the soft border of the shadows). In all other parts
(ie. fully illuminated or fully shadowed) it doesn't matter how dense the
light source is, as long as the adaptiveness is fixed (that is, a 4x4 area
light and a 100x100 area light will be equally fast).
  In a regular scene there's probably about 1%, in the worst case perhaps
even 10% of penumbra in the image area. Big deal?

-- 
#macro M(A,N,D,L)plane{-z,-9pigment{mandel L*9translate N color_map{[0rgb x]
[1rgb 9]}scale<D,D*3D>*1e3}rotate y*A*8}#end M(-3<1.206434.28623>70,7)M(
-1<.7438.1795>1,20)M(1<.77595.13699>30,20)M(3<.75923.07145>80,99)// - Warp -

Post a reply to this message