Global Illumination Tutorial
(Thanks to Takafumi Moroishi this tutorial is also available in Japanese)

Requirements: In order for you to do this tutorial, you will need Softimage3.8 SP2 with Mental Ray 2.1

Intro

This version of Softimage lets you add Global Illumination(radiosity) to your scenes, using the Mental Ray renderer.
This tutorial shows you how to use five lights to go from something like this:

to this:

Tutorial Scenes:

I have provided a scene database for you to use with this tutorial.
In order to download the scene, you might have to "Shift click" or right click and "save as" on the link.

You can download it here. Scene.zip
This file has been compressed with winzip. (It's possible that, after downloading this file, you will need to add the extension .zip to the end of the file name in order for it to work properly with your compression program.)

In the database there are 2 scenes. clean-scene and global-room.

The clean-scene contains just the base scene. (No Global Illumination settings.)

The "global-room" scene is what you should end up with when you finish the tutorial.

Getting Started:

Start with the "clean" scene.

1. Load up the clean-scene.
2. Preview the scene

It should look like this.

The quality is really bad and needs a lot of help.

First thing to do is to turn the Ambient light off.

1. Matter>Atmosphere>Ambience.
2. Turn all the values down to 0.
3. Click Ok.

Preview

.

It still looks bad, and now the ceiling isn't visible. (We will fix that later on)

Click here to go to the next page

Click here to go back to the tutorial page