Precomputed vs Manual Lighting

This Monday Movie is a good one, though it’s kind of a loosy-goosy topic so if I sound lost it’s because some things are hard to describe. Here we’re talking about the old-school way of lighting; omni lights and careful rendertime management. By using ambient-only omni lights and careful light projection, you can achieve results similar to what advanced automatic solutions could provide but at a fraction of the computational difficulty.

Bringing the render time down below 20 seconds per frame is critical in making an animation for a client or for yourself. No sense spending an entire weekend to render something that a little care and technique could have confined to a 3-hour stint. Enjoy this brief overview of how you can trim those minutes down to seconds.