Ugh, I Know, More Lighting

For the past few days I went back to testing out even more lighting possibilities, seeing how it's one of the bigger bottlenecks impeding production. If you haven't been able to tell yet, this stuff can get pretty complicated.

After reading through a ton of Siggraph Papers about the spherical harmonics solution and learning there is no automated implementation for Maya/Mental Ray we can use, I happened to stumble upon this:

Smart IBL

This quite literally seems like a gift from the heavens. It works with Final Gathering, the most commonly used method to calculate indirect light. The problem with the Final Gather approach is normaly you get results like these:


YUCK!!

The ways to avoid this flickering is either to increase samples to an insane amount, which still can cause problems and increases render time, or significantly decrease the samples and blurring them together which causes a loss of quality.

But thanks to Smart IBL, they have an automated solution that gives awesome results in less render time. Here is my quick test:


YAY!!

No noticeable flicker! There is a little variation on the walls, but that is from the light bouncing off the cubes which should be there.