Why is ambient set to 1 on Forest Superior materials?
TheWheelMan
Posts: 1,014
I own the Forest Bundle, and I'm using Forest Superior in a Poser render that I'm rendering through Reality 3, which now recognizes ambient settings. That's why I noticed that most of the props have ambient turned on, because they are all listed under Light Groups. I just wonder why one would turn on ambient for nearly all of the props? What purpose does having ambient on serve for a non-glowing object? It's really inconvenient when importing into Reality because in at least one case it was causing a prop to render in Reality as white, presumably because with the ambient it's texture was blown out. I turned off ambient on many of the props, including the rocks, and it's rendering fine now.
I just wondered if anyone could shed some light on the purpose of using ambient if it's not being used as a light source?
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Comments
Ambient, as the name implies, was included to fake ambient lighting - in DS it is multiplied with the diffuse, so that works, but in Poser it is separate and so glows and in Luxrender via reality it is apparently treated as a light source. I'd prefer it to be off, and hadn't noticed that it wasn't when I tried out the Forest sets, but for the target applications - at least for DS - it makes a degree of sense for faking translucence on the leaves.
Ah, that makes sense. Thanks Richard.
The ability to recognize ambient glow was just added to the Reality 3.1 update, as I think a lot of people wanted it. So when it discovers an ambient glow, it converts it to a light source. Very useful except in cases like this.
Yes, ambient - especially in Poser - is often or even mainly used to fake glows, and people complain about the fact that it doesn't really work for that in DS.