Global illumination overview

- The Mental Ray renderer has a number of…powerful global illumination, or GI, systems available…that can all be used to create or even recreate…pretty much any lighting scenario required.…There is photon mapping, referred to in…the Maya UI as global illumination;…Final Gather; Irradiance Particles; and Importons.…We gain access to these systems…through the Indirect Lighting tab…found in Maya's Render Settings dialog.…Here we have a host of direct and indirect lighting tools,…including the IBL, physical sun and sky…as well as caustic photon options.…

It does have to be said that despite…being Mental Rays oldest GI tools,…meaning they have been around for quite some time,…the photon mapping and final gather feature sets…that we will look at in this chapter are…extremely powerful production-proven tools that give us…the ability to easily switch between physically correct…and artistically correct approaches to our lighting setups.…These systems can, as with the newer irradiance particle…and importons options, be tuned for speed should we find…