The Lightwave 3D renderer is one of the most widely used in Film and Broadcast production because of its quality, workflow, and speed. It can now do image-based lighting due to a number of architecture enhancements in the 6.0 and 6.5 versions. One of these critical new architectures is a full precision rendering pipeline from top to bottom. Another critical ingredient is a global illumination model. Global illumination simulations produce more accurate images of lighting in scenes, by considering more light sources than simple illumination models.

Light sources include actual lights as well as their diffuse reflection from surfaces, their specular reflection, luminous surfaces, surfaces textured with HDR (high dynamic-range) images, volumetrics, and environments. These simulations produce ‘pixel’ values which vary from millions to millionths. Such results require floating point storage to hold both the bright values over 100% (255), and the subtle shading in the dark areas, which have values less than 1/255, and would become black in a 24 bit image. Preserving very high values as well as subtle gradations is important not only for output, but also for image-based lighting methods which require HDR images to reproduce natural lighting environments.

Download Image-based Lighting in Lightwave 3D Tutorial