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A New Feature I Gather.....
Gather is the next step after the ambient occlusion node: It collects the light from surfaces around it, thus creating indirect illumination and color bleeding. When you put the gather node on a ball and place that ball in front of a red plane, the gather node will pick up the red on those sides of the sphere that face the wall, recreating the effect of red light refrecting from the wall. Ambient light is your helper when you want to apply gather (or any other node) to many objects in your scene. In a scene with dozens of shaders, it would be a tedious task to apply the gather node to every one of them and then to go through all those shaders again and again every time you want to tweak a parameter of the gather node. In 5.5, you can now use ambient light for this, which works in two parts: An ambient shader and the ambient node. Think of the ambient node as a placeholder for the ambient shader: If you create a red ambient shader, the ambient node in every other shader will be red. Create a checkerboard ambient shader and every ambient node will output that checkerboard pattern. You can add the ambient node to your shaders like any other node, and it is included in the “surface” and “sm3surface” nodes for your convenience. The ambient light shader can be set and enabled in the Render Options/Ambient Light attribute. If you have used the Atmosphere effect before, this is a similar concept. Now in this example scene that you can download by clicking on the image, I have created an ambient shader that includes the gather node and added the ambient node to the surface shaders of the objects in the scene. When rendering, the gather effect applies to all these objects, creating the effect of light being bounced around in the scene. When you open the scene and change the parameters of the gather node (for example, decreasing the “samples” parameter will decrease the quality but make it render faster), you will see these changes apply to the entire scene. -Stefan Warner, |
