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Tips to speed up environment lights on volumes? Old-school tricks?


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Hi!  I'm working on a project with pretty limited rendering resources and am trying to avoid an expensive environment light on my hero volume.  I have dialed back Mantra's step size, shadow step size and opacity step size but I need more.  I have also tried reduced the environment light's sampling quality but it seems to need to stay at 2 for my 16spp render.  I am using volume shader core, and of course volume indirect is off.

 

I am super-curious to hear any tricks to get a similar look to an environment light without an environment light.  When I think about it, for a volume it is really the AO-style overcast day lighting that I really like.  I think (but need to test) that multiple area lights on my volume would be just expensive as the environment light...  but I am wondering if there are any old-school tricks to replicate the AO look with only point, spot and directional lights.  Similarly, if there is any way to hack up an AO volume shader in VOPs rather than computing true lighting.

 

I feel like there must be some old-fashioned ways of lighting volumes that can get me 80% of my look at 10% of my render time... but if not, I will at least learn more about Mantra!

Edited by Nicholas Ralabate
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