Advanced Lighting

Advanced Lighting
in Turtle

In this tutorial we delve deep into the

Global Illumination and Environment
system featured in Turtle 5.

The model should look pretty rough,

we're using Turtle's built in subdivision
It takes some time with any rendering surface option for speed. Go ahead and
software to get to the point where you're render a frame and you should see a
confident in setting up a beautiful render. smoother cup, although there's no Global
This tutorial will attempt to provide you with Illumination going on yet so it's pretty black.
lots of shortcuts that can help you get really
nice renders in Turtle and lay out a good
Direct Light only
workflow for lighting many different types of
scenes. You'll also find in-depth technical
notes on a lot of the components and
concepts included in Turtle’s Global
Illumination and Environment system. You can
work through the examples without reading
the technical notes if you wish, but be sure to
look at them for reference later if needed.

The first example we'll look at is an

9 sec
indoor/studio setup of an espresso cup on a
table. Open the demo scene espresso.mb.
 Global Illumination

The scene is lit with a single area light

so that we can better check out the
effects of the different GI possibilities.
For a real studio lighting setup, you'd
probably want to use a few additional
fill lights to lighten the image. Open the
Global Illumination tab in the Render
Settings and check Enable Global
Illumination. The Global Illumination is
handled by a Primary and a Secondary
light integrator which can be paired
together in various combinations. Most
often, you'll want a high-quality Primary
GI like Final Gather, and a faster, low-
quality Secondary GI like Photon
Mapping or Path Tracing.

Turtle defaults to only Final Gather when you enable Global Illumination which is
exactly what we want. The default settings should be OK for a preview render, so
render out a frame.

Rays: 300
The Final Gather algorithm is very
Depth: 1
Contrast Threshold: 0.1
expensive as it tries to estimate the
Interpolation Points: 15 lighting for any pixel by lots and lots
of rays in every direction. Luckily
indirect illumination changes pretty
slowly, so we don't have to calculate
a full Final Gather solution for every
pixel. As you saw in the render, we
do get some splotches with the
preview settings, which basically tells
us that we cheated a bit too much
16 sec with the Final Gather settings.

A quick way to move between a splotchy preview render and a high-quality render is
by simply tweaking the Gathering Rays parameter. 100-300 is often a good starting
point for preview renders. For final renders you should usually boost it to 1000 or
higher. You might need to tweak Contrast Threshold and Interpolation Points as well.
Contrast Threshold affects how many points are generated, depending on the
difference in illumination. A lower threshold will generate more points and capture
more details. Interpolation Points controls the number of points used for each
interpolation in the final render pass. A higher number will blur the solution and help
smooth out artifacts and splotches.
 For this scene, increasing the Rays: 1000
Depth: 1
Gathering Rays setting to 1000 and
Contrast Threshold: 0.1
increasing Interpolation Points to 20 Interpolation Points: 20
should remove all of the artifacts.

The current configuration only gives

us one bounce of indirect light. For a
correct multi-bounce Final Gather
render, we can set the Final Gather
Depth to 2 or higher. Try setting the
Depth to 4 and render out a new
frame. The render time has increased 21 sec
a bit, but if we compare the image to
the previous render, we see slightly
Rays: 1000
more indirect lighting in the shadows. Depth: 4
Contrast Threshold: 0.1
Final Gather can get quite expensive
Interpolation Points: 20
when using multiple bounces, which
makes the render times long for
production quality renders.
Fortunately there are tricks we can
use to get all that neat multi-bounce
indirect light without using Final
Gather. We can keep the Final Gather
as Primary GI, which will shade final
27 sec
pixel values with a high quality Final

Gather, but set Secondary GI to something else and handle indirect light bounces with
a lower quality, faster GI algorithm. Both Photon Mapping and Path Tracing are a good
choice for Secondary GI. They also work as Primary GI, but generally produce results
below the quality of Final Gather. Photon Mapping is Light Source centric and requires
that you explicitly set Light Sources to emit photons into the scene. It may take some
work to get the amount of Photon Energy right, and if you have many Light Sources,
tweaking them all might be a pain. Path Tracing on the other hand, is Camera centric,

TE CH NI C A L NOT E

Gather – a quick explanation

When Turtle makes a 'gather', it samples the environment for data by shooting
rays in many directions from a given point. The data sought for can be e.g.
occlusion or indirect illumination.
TE CH NI C A L NOT E

Primary GI vs Secondary GI

In Turtle, the indirect light is split into two categories, Primary GI and Secondary
GI. Secondary GI is sampled only by Primary GI. This gives us the possibility to
use a high quality technique (e.g. Final Gather) as the main GI method, and a
faster method (e.g. Path Tracer) for deeper levels of indirect light.

The following table shows which techniques can be combined as Primary and
Secondary GI.

Primary GI

Final Gather Path Tracer Photon Map Monte Carlo

Final Gather  - - -
Secondary GI

Path Tracer  - - 
Photon Map  - - 
Monte Carlo  - - -

Note that you can set the primary GI to 'None'. This option should be used for
certain baking outputs, such as PTM or non-adaptive RNM. Since these outputs
performs their own gather, and gather rays always samples the secondary GI, you
can set the primary GI to 'None' to avoid unnecessary pre-passes.

Not mentioned here is the primary GI option 'Dynamic Photon Map'. This is
meant to be used for baking purposes only, and is covered by our point cloud
baking tutorial.

and basically sends out a large amount of rays that bounce around the scene and
estimate the illumination. The advantage here is that there's noting to tweak besides
the global Path Tracer settings. Final Gather, Photon Mapping and Path Tracing all
have their peculiarities as to how they sample the scene, so you should expect slightly
different results from these three. Try them out and use the one you like!

We have one limitation when lighting this scene that is not immediately obvious. If
you inspect the Area Light, you’ll notice that we have texture mapped the Color
attribute. Photons do not respect textured Light Sources for performance, so we'll
check out the Path Tracer instead for this example. Select Path Tracer as Secondary GI.
The Path Tracer calculations are saved in a cache, where the resolution of the cache is
given by the parameter Cache Point Spacing. The automatic value of the Cache Point
Spacing will generate around 2500 points, which will give us a GI that is a little too
blurred. Manually setting the value to 0.2 will get us around 14,000 cache points,
which is better. Letting Turtle render one frame with automatic Cache Point Spacing
will get you a good starting point for tuning, as the calculated value will be written out
in the Output Window (as ”[INFO] PathTracer Cache Point Spacing : 0.677616”).
Final Gather + Path Tracer, 1024x768

49 sec

We get rather comparable results when compared to the four-bounce Final Gather,
but in a shorter render time (21 seconds). Let's use this settings and render out a
higher resolution image (1024x768).

The neat thing about the Path Tracer is that it is completely unbiased, meaning that
you should get quite close to a physically correct Global Illumination solution if
enough rays are used. It will also adaptively sample the scene, halting at a suitable
depth where the benefit of further sampling is negligible.

Note that you can save Final Gather, Photon Mapping and Path Tracer calculations to a
file. So a nice trick with the Path Tracer is to trace a very large amount of rays once,
save this to a file, and then just reuse that solution afterwards. Saving GI solutions to
file is both a time saver and a great help when tuning your renders. Try setting Use FG
Map File to Overwrite and type in a file name. Enable Visualize in Model View, and hit
render.

Looking at the actual solution in

this way can give valuable hints on
how to proceed with tuning the
scene. Blindly changing values is
generally a bad idea, so learn to
use the GI map visualization in your
everyday work.
TE CH NI C A L NOT E

Point Cloud visualization

All GI effects which generate some form of cache with points can be set to save
its data to a point cloud file. If used together with the setting 'Visualize in Model
View' (available for all GI effects for which it applies), a point cloud shape will be
created for the GI data, showing you the distribution of points in the scene
directly in the Maya viewport. This can be a powerful tool when fine tuning some
of the GI techniques, so remember to try it out.

Image Based Lighting

Direct Light only

The next scene we'll look at is a

glossy cartoon character. We'll try out
some different ways to light the
scene, and various ways to get nice
reflections on the glossy shaders.
Open up bunnyman.mb and render
out a frame!
4 sec

We get a very boring render, but that's because there's an important point to be
made. If you check the Outliner, there aren't any Light Sources in the scene, so what
we're seeing is the Default Light of Maya. In a perfect world, you wouldn't have to
worry about this, because as soon as you start to add your own lights, the Default
Light will not be contributing. But when using a renderer like Turtle there are situations
where we do not explicitly create light sources, like when we are using an Environment
for lighting or performing Advanced Baking. In some of these situations, you will get a
contribution from the Default Light in Maya and might not be aware of this fact, so you
should get accustomed to switching off the Default Light as early as possible in a
project. Open up Render Settings  Common  Render Options and switch off the
Default Light.

There are two main options for lighting a scene with an environment. We can set up
a Final Gather rendering and have those rays that miss the scene shaded by the
Environment, getting a sort of indirect contribution. We can also use another method in
Turtle, where we explicitly emit light into the scene from a selected image without
using Global Illumination. This can be somewhat confusing, but just keep in mind that
Image Based Lighting is a pretty loose term, and in Turtle there are two different
approaches to Image Based Lighting. See the technical note below for more
information.
TE CH NI C A L NOT E

Image Based Lighting (IBL)

IBL can be used in two ways to add light to a scene; by generating a set of directional
lights that approximate the light from the IBL dome, and by using it as GI
environment.

• Directional light method - The first method is

used by enabling the 'Emit Light' check box for
the IBL. Directional lights are created with
different colors and intensities to represent the
light emitted from the dome. This method can get
slow if the number of lights (as given by the
setting 'Samples') used to represent the dome is
set high, but it allows for a more dynamic lighting
and more distinct shadows.

• GI environment method – This method is enabled

by setting the GI Environment to 'Image Based
Lighting', and use this with a Global Illumination
method like Final Gather or Path Tracer. Then the
IBL dome will be used to shade all GI rays that
miss geometry in the scene (similar to sky light). If
the image used for IBL varies a lot in intensity,
there is a risk of splotchiness in e.g. Final Gather.
To avoid this it is recommended to blur the IBL
image using the IBL setting 'Blur for GI'. This
method is generally faster than the first above.

For starters, head over to debevec.org (makes a great bookmark) and grab some
light probes that you like. We'll be using the Uffizi probe in this tutorial. A basic rule of
thumb in sampling theory is that any resolution larger than what you are rendering to
is a waste of time for both textures and environment image maps (it can actually be up
to 2x larger, but anything beyond will get lost in the sampling). So a very much
overlooked method of optimization is to resize your light probes to something that will
match the rendered details in the image with the image map itself roughly pixel-by-
pixel. So remember that using a 500MB HDR light probe will only slow down the
render, not increase image quality!

If you take a look at the Anti-Aliasing settings in the Render Settings  Sampling tab,
you'll notice that we're using Adaptive Sampling, with 1 to 16 samples per pixel. There
are some important points to be made about the sampling system in Turtle. First, it
works by looking at neighboring samples, and based on the difference, they will be
further sampled if the difference is too large. When you are using HDR light probes,
you might introduce extremely large variations in intensity in the image, which will
most definitely force Turtle to sample harder. In many cases, you are rendering out
your images to 8-bit format. This is the case for jpeg, targa, tiff and the Maya
renderview.
 In this case final pixel values will be clamped and quantized to integer intensity values
between 0-255. Any super-sampling of values above pure white will in this case be a
waste of render time and final quality, as the resulting pixel will be clamped down
anyway. There's actually a performance option in Turtle called Clamp Values which
clamps extreme values already at the sampling level, which can alleviate a lot of this
unnecessary sampling. Always try to use Clamp Values when you are previewing work
in the Maya renderview or rendering to 8-bit file formats!

We'll start out by using the light emitting IBL system in Turtle, which will analyze the
light probe and light the scene with virtual light sources approximating the light probe.
The advantage is that we will get very detailed shadows, as the scene is lit by 'real'
light, but we pay the price in render time. This system is a per-pixel effect, so if we
specify that we want 100 Samples, we will actually shade every pixel sample with the
equivalent of using around 100 ordinary Light Sources. 100 Samples is a reasonable
setting for the IBL, but for final renders you can go as high as 1000.

Go ahead and open Render Settings  Environment  Image Based Lighting, and
set Image File to one of your downloaded light probes. Open the Light Emission tab
found slightly below and enable Emit Light. Render out a frame!

Light Probe: Uffizi Here, it’s only the light probe giving
IBL Light Emission light, but it's not actually reflecting in
Samples: 100
the Bunnyman shaders. If you check at
the top of the Environment tab,
Environment and GI Environment are
both set to Camera Background. Since
we are not using Global Illumination, all
you need to do is change Environment
from Camera Background to Image
Based Lighting, and Turtle should use
the light probe for reflections and in the

1:53 min
background. Render out a new image.

Light Probe: Uffizi That's starting to look quite nice,

IBL Light Emission although we got an added bonus of
Samples: 100
having the IBL in the background as
Environment: IBL
well. For such a stylistic render, you
might find a light blue color or a sky
background looks better which is quite
easy to set up too. In the Render ->
Environment tab uncheck Visible in
Background. Select the camera persp
and open up its Environment tab. Here
you can change the constant color of
1:56 min the background, but we'll create an
Image Plane, so just click Create.
You should get the Attribute Editor for
 the created Image Plane. Set Image Name to the texture bluesky01.png, found in the
sourceImages folder of the example project. A slight Maya peculiarity that you might
want to know about is that if you connect an Image Plane for the Camera, be sure to
change the Display Mode in the Image Plane Attributes to RGB instead of RGBA; if the
image has no alpha channel, it will still get modified by the luminance of the image,
resulting in a darker image! To get the image to stretch to the resolution of the frame,
select To Size for Fit in the Placement tab and click Fit to Resolution Gate. The current
setup lets us try out some different light probes, but still use a provided backdrop, so
go ahead and try out a few different light probes for the IBL lighting.

Galileo 1:21 min

Uffizi 1:49 min

Kitchen 1:35 min

As you can see, the IBL system is quite expensive in render time, but you will notice
more detailed shadows for more mechanical or architectural scenes, so it can be a
valuable trick to know for high-quality renders. An important part of getting the right
workflow with Turtle is to experiment, so don't settle for what you get out of the IBL
system if it's not to your liking, try using it as a base for further lighting, mixing it in
different ways with Global Illumination and seeing what you can come up with. There
are really no rules for what you can and can't use at any time with Turtle, so you might
just stumble on a great style of lighting by accident.

A very powerful way to get fast renders with Image Based Lighting is to use it
together with Global Illumination instead. Final Gather for instance can handle this
beautifully. Uncheck the Emit Light option in the Light Emission tab of the IBL system to
remove the virtual light sources we used to light the scene with earlier. In the upper
part of the Environment tab, change the GI Environment from Camera Background to
Image Based Lighting. This makes the light probe environment visible for all GI
algorithms, including Final Gather, which means that any rays exiting the scene will
pick up light from the light probe.
 In the Global Illumination tab, check
Light Probe: Uffizi
Final Gather Enable Global Illumination. Select Final
GI Environment: IBL Gather as the Primary GI and None as
Secondary GI. Single depth Final Gather
will work just fine for many outdoor
scenes. Everything should now be set,
so render out a frame.

Neat! Render times were cut down to

less than 30% of the time compared to a
0:31 min full IBL render.

Since the light probe is sampled indirectly now by the Final Gather, the illumination
from the light probe can get smoother and slightly less detailed. Because we're not
importance sampling the image for intense areas, it can also be sensitive for light
probes with small bright areas. So if you get artifacts in the Final Gather solution, you
can alleviate them by pre-blurring the light probe. There is a Blur for GI option in the
IBL tab, but this can increase the render times for very large light probes. So always try
to pre-blur in an external program like HDR Shop if you can.

Both Final Gather and the IBL Emit Light method create quite smooth shading. An
improvement for most renders is adding some sharp shadows. In an outdoor scene like
this, a Directional Light with sharp shadows makes huge improvements to the final
image by adding the impression of a single point of origin of strong sunlight.

Create a new Directional Light with Ray

Light Probe: Uffizi
Final Gather
Trace Shadows enabled. Orient it so
GI Environment: IBL that it's shining down onto Bunnyman
Directional Light (sun) at an angle. Since we now have added a
strong new light source to the scene we
can decrease the contribution from the
light probe, otherwise the image would
be much brighter. So set Environment 
GI Environment → Intensity to 0.5, and
render out a new frame.
0:17 min

Notice how this also cut the render time almost in half! This is because a lower light
probe intensity is much cheaper for the Final Gather to sample. It's using adaptive
sampling and when the contrast difference is decreased, fewer rays needs to be traced
and fewer Final Gather points needs to be created.

TE CH NI C A L NOT E

Performance

If you feel the GI render is slow, there are a couple of things you can try apart from
fine tuning the settings for the used GI technique:

• Enable 'Clamp Values' for anti-aliasing. Clamping values will reduce the
difference between bright pixels, causing anti-aliasing to take less samples.

• Disable 'Preview Calculation Pass' for current GI technique.

Light Probe: Uffizi
Final Gather
GI Environment: IBL
Directional Light (sun)
1024x768
0:46 min

We are now quite happy with out settings, so let's render out a higher resolution
image (1024x768).

You might have thought about the idea of using both the IBL Emit Light and
Final Gather, and this is certainly possible. In some rendering you might need the
high quality IBL from the IBL Emit Light method, but you also need multiple indirect
light bounces. In that case both methods needs to be used. However, if care is not
taken, you can easily set the World Record in longest render times ever! If we are
using 100 Final Gather rays for every pixel sample, and are using 100 IBL light
sources, we will actually do 1002 light source calculations for every pixel sample.
And this is a pretty mild example!

One trick to get render times down is to use the Path Tracer as Secondary GI, with
the option Cache Direct Light enabled (found in Path Tracer Advanced Settings).
This will force the IBL Emit Light to be evaluated only for Path Tracer rays and the
result is saved in the Path Tracer cache. Final Gather rays will then read from this
cache instead of doing new IBL Emit Light calculations, which is much cheaper.

Remember that if you enable both the IBL Emit Light, and have the IBL as GI
Environment, you will get a double contribution from the light probe. Either set the
intensities of the emitted light and the GI Environment to 0.5 each, or select None
as GI Environment to avoid doubling the illumination. The pictures below show the
results for this scene using the Path Tracer trick.
 Uffizi
IBL Emit Light
Uffizi
(no GI)
IBL Emit Light
Final Gather

2:14 min
Uffizi
2:53 min
IBL Emit Light
Final Gather
GI Environment is set Path Tracing
to None for all three
renderings.

2:27 min

More Global Illumination

Direct Light only 5 sec

We'll take a look at one final

scene, setting up photon
mapping and caustics for an
architectural scene. Open up
archviz.mb and render out a
frame.

We've got a small room with some furniture, lit by a single Directional Light
acting as a sun. We've got some glass, some chrome and some colored materials so
we can really see the Global Illumination effects. Let's go ahead and enable Global
Illumination, so open up Render Settings  Render  Global Illumination and check
Enable Global Illumination. Make sure you've got Final Gather as Primary GI and
None as Secondary GI. Go ahead and render a frame.
TE CH NI C A L NOT E

Final Gather, the not so gritty details

Final gather is the technique you should use as the Primary GI for most scenes.
This gathers indirect light at sparsely placed points in the scene. During render
time, these points will be interpolated to add indirect light contribution to the
point being shaded. Here's a description of the settings you most often need to
tune.

• Rays - The number of rays sent to gather the indirect light for each
sample point. Increasing this value improves quality up to a certain point.
If you want to improve quality further, try lowering Contrast Threshold or
increase Interpolation Points.

• Contrast Threshold – This is the tolerance for contrast difference between

sample points. Decreasing this will increases the point density in areas
where contrast is high. This allows for higher detailed GI at the cost of
longer render time.

• Interpolation Points – The number of points used in interpolations.

Increasing this number yields smoother results at the cost of less detail
and smeared indirect light.

• Final Gather Depth - This sets the number of recursive gathers that
should be made. A higher number means deeper levels of indirect light,
but also longer render times (since we might need a new gather at every
point where a previous gathering ray hit a surface).

Final Gather Depth 1 Final Gather Depth 2

Final Gather
Rays: 300
Contrast Threshold: 0.1
Interpolation Points: 15
Final Gather 13 sec
Rays: 1000
Contrast Threshold: 0.1
Interpolation Points: 25
Gamma Correction: On
(Input Gamma: 2.2
Output Gamma: 2.2)
10 sec We get quite a lot of
splotches, so we'll have to tune
the Final Gather settings. As can
be seen in the Direct Light
rendering above there are a lot
of black areas and very few
illuminated areas. To capture
the small illuminated areas
properly we need more FG Rays.
So increase Rays to 1000. We
can also increase the
Interpolation Points from 15 to
25, which will smooth out the
solution, removing any
remaining splotches. Render out
a frame!
That's looking quite good
already! If you take a look in
Render Settings  Options 
Framebuffer, you'll notice that
Gamma Correction is enabled.
Just to see the difference,
uncheck Input Gamma
Correction and set Output
Correction to None. Render out
a new frame.
Gamma Correction: Off
(Input Gamma: 1.0
Output Gamma: 1.0)
It's looking quite a bit darker, and worse than the previous image with Gamma
Correction enabled. The thing to remember though is that if we'd done the reverse,
started out with Gamma Correction disabled, we'd have lit the scene so that it
looked good in that case, then it would have looked bad when we enabled Gamma
Correction. It is vital that you light your scene with the correct Gamma Correction
for your pipeline from the start, because changing Gamma Correction late in the
tuning of the scene will alter the whole intensity level and shading of the scene.

Your monitor has a nonlinear intensity output, so any color you select on your
monitor will be distorted from the true linear color representation. Internally, Turtle
assumes all the textures and colors are in linear color space, because shading
performed in linear color space will be very close to physically correct. The Gamma
Correction system in Turtle lets you specify how both the textures you input and
colors you select will be interpreted and converted. By default, no Gamma
Correction is performed, because this is the default of the Maya Software renderer.
In a real production situation, it is much better though to use Gamma Correction,
because we will select colors on a nonlinear display device, and we will most often
be viewing it in the Maya renderview, that is, displayed on a nonlinear display
device.

Many Turtle settings have both a color attribute and a separate Intensity parameter.
This is intentional, because colors are gamma corrected, scalar values such as
Intensity are not. Usually, you know that you maybe want to boost the Intensity by a
factor of 10. You might set the Color itself to such a brightness, but gamma
correcting a value outside of the intensity 0.0 – 1.0 will generally be a bad idea,
because gamma correction is strictly an operation meaningful on values in that
domain. By keeping your color channels within the 0.0 – 1.0 range, and placing the
boost factor in Intensity, the color is correctly gamma corrected, and the Intensity
value is passed into Turtle untouched, so you get the 10x boost you wanted.

The only special precaution you need to be aware of is if you are to process the
images further, if you or someone else will be compositing the renders or
manipulating them in Photoshop. In this case it can be very advantageous to keep
the compositing in linear color space as well, and gamma correct the final
composited material instead. You should, in this case, light the scene using full
Gamma Correction, Before you render out passes for compositing, however, you
should change Output Gamma Correction to 1.0. This will gamma correct input
colors, but give you a linear output. HDR image file formats are for exactly this
reason treated as linear file formats for both input and output. You can happily
render with full Gamma Correction inside Maya, any HDR or EXR file written will still
be in linear color!

Enable Gamma Correction again. The image is still a bit dark, so a quick fix is to
tweak the Intensity and Saturation values of the Primary GI. In Render Settings 
Render  Global Illumination → Color Balance, set Primary Intensity 4.0, and render
a frame.
Primary Intensity: 1.0 13 sec Primary Intensity: 4.0 22 sec
Primary Saturation: 1.0 Primary Saturation: 1.0

Tweaking the Intensity and Saturation Primary Intensity: 4.0 22 sec

Primary Saturation: 2.0
of the Primary and Secondary GI is a
pretty fast way of changing the
appearance of the GI solution. In this
case we're merely boosting a one bounce
GI solution, we can get a much lighter
render by increasing the number of light
bounces in the GI solution as well, and
get more interesting lighting in the
process. Change Intensity and Saturation
values back to 1.0.

The quickest way to setup a multi-bounce GI solution is simply to use Final

Gather also for the additional bounces. In the Final Gather settings, increase the
Final Gather Depth. Set Depth to 5 and render out a frame. The image looks much
brighter, since we now have 5 bounces of light.

Final Gather 18 sec

Rays: 1000
Contrast Threshold: 0.1
Interpolation Points: 25
Depth: 5
 Next we’ll be using Final Gather together with Photon Mapping, a setup which is
very powerful for many scenes. Photon Mapping is very fast at calculating a large
number of indirect bounces. However often it cannot be used as Primary GI for
quality reasons. So we can combine it with Final Gathering, using Final Gather as
Primary GI and Photon Mapping as Secondary GI. In the Render Settings  Global
Illumination, select Photon Map as Secondary GI. Also don't forget to reset Final
Gather Depth back to 1, since we only want the first bounce of Final Gather now.

When using Photon Mapping, we must

Photon Energy: 8000
specify that light sources should emit
32 sec photons. Select the Directional Light and
open it's Attribute Editor. First we need to
add Turtle specific GI Attributes to it. In the
Attribute Editor's top menu, click Turtle and
select Add Light GI Attributes. Now a new
Turtle tab should appear at the bottom of the
Attribute Editor (Turtle  Global
Illumination). Open this tab and enable Emit
Photons. Then we must set the energy of the
photons. This Photon Energy value is the one
thing that will cause you the most headaches,

Photon Energy: 500 12 sec

since you have to tune this yourself. Leave it
at 8000 and go ahead render out a frame.

The image is far too bright. By tuning it

we find that using an energy of 500 will
match our previous results pretty good. So
set Photon Energy to 500 and render again.

By default the Photon Map is set to Cache

Direct Light, see Technical Note below. To
get more detailed and dynamic lighting we
can disable this feature. FG rays will than
always calculate high quality direct lighting.

TE CH NI C A L NOT E

Cache Direct Light

Most Secondary GI methods in Turtle can be setup to cache direct light as well as
indirect light. This increases performance since fewer direct light calculations are
needed. It's worth to keep in mind though that this gives an approximate result,
and hence can affect the quality of the lighting. For instance indirect light
bounces from specular highlights might be lost.

This is available for Photon Mapping, Path Tracing and multi-bounce Final
Gather. It's controlled by a check box in the Advanced Settings of each method.
For Photon Mapping and Path Tracing this is enabled by default.

If you want indirect bounces from highlights and other shader specific effects,
your should disable this feature.
Photon Energy: 500 Photon Energy: 500
Cache Direct Light: On Cache Direct Light: Off

12 sec 15 sec

We can actually raise the number of photons emitted quite a lot without paying
in render time, because emitting photons is very fast. Increase Global Photons to
100,000 and render out a frame. We get some more color bleeding, and the render
time difference is negligible. If you compare the render with the 5 bounce Final
Gather we did earlier, you should notice that we have very comparable image
quality, but shorter render time. the full Final Gather rendering. Try rendering the
scene with 1,000,000 photons, and you'll only see a few seconds increase in render
time.

Global Photons: 10,000 15 sec Global Photons: 100,000 15 sec

Global Photons: 1,000,000 17 sec

 There are actually two different Photon Mapping algorithms hidden away in
Turtle. The default algorithm is called Grid Based Photon Mapping, which makes a
slight tradeoff in quality for much faster render times. The second algorithm is
called Standard Photon Mapping and is slightly more accurate. In the Render
Settings  Global Illumination  Global Photon Map  Advanced Settings, go
ahead and change the Algorithm to Standard Photon Mapping. Go ahead and render
out a frame.

We get quite a large increase in render time, but the Standard Photon Mapping is
optimized for quality. We can achieve a lot faster times by using something called
Precalculate Irradiance, which essentially pre-calculates some things before the
Photon Map is used, while sacrificing some accuracy. Go ahead and check Precalc.
Irradiance and render out a new frame.

Global Photons: 100,000 15 sec Global Photons: 100,000 36 sec

Grid Based Photon Mapping Standard Photon Mapping

Global Photons: 100,000 0:16 min

Standard Photon Mapping
Precalculate Irradiance

That did quite a bit for the render times, and we still have a nice render. It's a quite
difficult question as to whether you should use Grid Based Photon Mapping or
Standard Photon Mapping. You'll have to compare images of the two and see which
one you prefer as they result in subtle differences in shading. The default choice of
Grid Based Photon Mapping is a good choice for most scenes.
 TE CH NI C A L NOT E

Light Leakage Reduction

When using Photon Mapping or Path Tracing to produce indirect light, you
may experience light leaking through e.g. walls. This is due to the filters
these techniques use, which cannot exclude all sample points within their
radius that would be considered invalid.

If you use Photon Map or Path Tracer as Secondary GI and Final Gather as
Primary GI, the leakage may still pose a problem since the Primary GI will
gather the leaked light. To reduce this problem, you can enable the Light
Leakage Reduction setting in Final Gather. This technique works by using
Final Gather as a Secondary GI fallback when sampling close to walls and
corners, which effectively reduces the visible effect of the leakage.

For the Path Tracer there is also an alternative to this, easier to use. In Path
Tracer Advanced Settings you can enable Check Sample Visibility. This will
make sure that path tracer cache points located on different sides of a wall
will not be used together.

We'll look quickly at another very powerful tool for GI renders. In Turtle, you can
actually tune the look of the Global Illumination solution by adding Indirect Light
Sources. The Indirect Light Sources will shade the GI solution as a post process,
allowing you to boost, tint, or darken areas any way you want. This can save you a
lot of time tweaking the scene, since you can cache the GI calculations, and make
final shade adjustments completely with Indirect Light Sources. You can even light
link the Indirect Light Sources to specific objects.

Go ahead and create a Spot Light, and place it so that it lights up the area
around the arm chair. The key to making this an Indirect Light is to add Turtle
specific Intensity attributes. As before click Turtle in the Attribute Editor top menu,
and now select Add Intensity Attributes. In the Turtle tab that appears, enable Use
Indirect Light. If you render out a frame, you will notice that the render will be
almost completely black. As we have only a single Indirect Spot Light, anything
outside of the Spot Light cone will have no indirect illumination at all. Notice that
the direct illumination coming from the directional light is untouched. You can
easily mix in the main GI solution by adding an Indirect Ambient Light in the same
way. Just make sure to set the Ambient Shade attribute to 0.0, otherwise it will act
more like a point light.

Indirect Spot Light 12 sec Indirect Spot Light 15 sec

Indirect Ambient Light
 As final icing on the cake, we'll add some caustics. Start by removing the two
Indirect Light Sources. The Directional Light is already set to emit Caustic Photons
by default, so all we have to do is open Render Settings  Global Illumination and
check Enable Caustics. Let's add some illumination from the sky as well for this final
render, go ahead and open the Environment tab, and select Sky Light as GI
Environment. Render out a final frame.

Final Gather 16 sec

Photon Mapping
Caustics
Sky Light GI Environment

See the neat specular caustics on the wall from the glass table? Notice also the
subtle blue light coming in from the outside This is where we stop in this example,
but you can go ahead and tweak it a bit more. Try to add Depth of Field for
instance! Or why not render it out in passes and compose it in a compositing
package. This is where the fun starts!

Final Words

Hopefully we've at least scratched the surface of what's possible with Turtle and
whetted your appetite a bit. Your best bet is to keep experimenting with all the
different components found in Turtle. We've not even showed you any of the Turtle
specific nodes, but hopefully this will have you up and running with setting up your
own scenes with Turtle. Remember the technical notes for later, they might come in
handy!

We'd love to hear any feedback or comments on this tutorial, so please write us!
• Final Gather

• Photon Mapping

• Caustics

• Sky Light Environment

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