The Global Illumination Settings plug-in defines how Global Illumination is applied to this and all subcontainers. Global Illumination is a rendering technique that attempts to mimic real-world lighting behavior, taking into account that objects are illuminated by direct light (direct illumination) and receive/reflect/bounce light themselves from their surroundings (indirect illumination).
One part of the precomputation step generates separate lightmap UVs for each geometry. A precomputed real-time light map has a maximum size of 262,144 pixels (512x512, 1024x256, ...) and corresponds to a so called System. While Viz Engine 3.x only supports a single System per scene, multiple systems can be configured for the Viz Engine Render Pipeline using this plug-in.
If precomputation fails because not all geometries fit into a single lightmap, either the Lightmap Pixelsize can be increased or a new System can be added.
Note: This plug-in is located in: Plugins -> Container plug-ins -> Global
Compatibility Info: This plug-in works in the Viz Engine Render Pipeline only!
Global Illumination Parameters
Visibility
Render: The container itself and the hierarchy beyond is visible to the real-time renderer.
Global Illumination: The container itself and the hierarchy beyond is visible to the Global Illumination system.
System ID: Name of a system. All geometries in with the same System ID are placed into the same lightmap. The same System ID can be used in multiple instances of Global Illumination.
Instance Type
Radiosity: Marks the geometries on the container itself and the hierarchy beyond as immovable and lit by a lightmap.
Fully Dynamic: Marks geometries on the container itself and the hierarchy beyond as dynamic, they are not included in the lightmap, can be moved at runtime and are lit by the SH probes.
Tip: There is no absolute rule for how large to make your systems, that is, how much geometry to assign to one system. However, it is recommended that you keep your systems small. The precompute time per system should be less than ten minutes, as a general rule.
Note: The GI Settings plug-in supersedes the automatic mesh classification of Viz Artist 3. Automatic mesh classification is not supported anymore in the Viz Engine Render Pipeline.
The Precompute button starts all GI computation steps. The current scene is analyzed and all necessary files are created so the GI backend can do its work. In the Viz Engine Render Pipeline implementation, incremental changes to the scene and incremental computation steps are supported, as long as the scene does not get not closed in between.