Indirect Light

Poser’s indirect light feature provides increased realism by adding light that naturally bounces off of objects to illuminate other surrounding objects. To use indirect light, create a scene that contains objects from which light will bounce onto your figure(s). For example, you can scale one or more primitive cubes to use as walls behind or near your figure. Point a directional light at the walls and the figure, and the light will bounce off the walls to illuminate the figure near it.

Due to the number of interpolations and calculations required for this feature, the practical use of indirect light in animation will be dependent on the number of elements in your scene and the quality settings set in your renderer.

Indirect lighting bounces light from surrounding objects.

Irradiance caching is used to calculate rays for locations where they can easily be determined. In-between locations are interpolated. The render engine determines whether to calculate or interpolate the rays based on the distance and direction of the current location to the locations previously calculated and the distance to other nearby objects.

Bounced light from IDL creates more realistic renders.

Related Settings in the Render Settings dialog include:

• Indirect light: Check this option to add indirect light for more realistic lighting
• Irradiance Caching: Determines the ratio of shading points where indirect light will be calculated by raytracing vs. those that will be interpolated.
  • Low values result in shorter render times, with more interpolation.
  • High values achieve more precise results at the expense of increased render times.
• Indirect Light Quality: Indirect Light Quality determines the number of rays used to calculate the indirect light. Higher values mean higher quality at the expense of longer render times.

The renderer will perform one pass as it samples the light rays. The pre-pass displays red dots in the places where indirect light is calculated explicitly. Following the pre-pass, the final render is completed using the indirect light calculated in the pre-pass.