Iray culling camera question

sunstrider46_691739df6a

I have a question. When using an Iray culling camera, can you use it inside the scene or outside the scene with a part of the scene like a wall removed. I am thinking of buying Interior Light Pro for Filament and Iray to solve my interior lighting problems with Iray. Any help would be appreciated. 

TimberWolf

There isn't really anything that's an 'Iray culling camera' as such. The product essentially superglues a section plane onto a standard camera and adds a slider to allow you to change that plane's position relative to the camera. You can make one yourself in under a minute. A section plane hides all the geometry on one side of its surface so in this case all the geometry behind the plane towards the direction of the camera will be culled. I have a suspicion the product camera might be a bit more sophisticated than the home brew one (two planes perhaps) but the concept is identical.

• Create -> New Camera. Zero out all the translation and rotation transforms to place it at world centre.
• Create -> New Iray Section Plane Node. Parent the plane to the camera and rotate the plane to +90 on the X axis. Move the section plane so that it is in front of the camera. Vary the position as required. You get an ERC slider with this light set (I think) that makes it a bit easier. Again, not difficult to do but beyond the scope of this reply!

Load your set, try it out.

The value in this set comes not from the camera but the HDRIs that come with it. Whilst it's fairly straightforward to make your own HDRIs you would need access to Photoshop or a good working knowledge of Gimp (et.al.) to create them and, at $8, you'd have to value your time fairly cheaply to go through the process yourself. It would take a while.

Looks like a good bet if you're struggling with interior lighting and using a single source HDRI will be faster than a myriad of points and spots but you will lose some finesse with your lighting. That's the trade-off. It's cheap enough and SY's products are very good in general. At that price you may as well!

The main point of this product is you don't have to go round deleting walls etc and fiddling with lighting. The camera (and the one you can self build) will do that automatically (and non-destructively) as you move it into position. Move the camera away and the geometry will reappear. Think of it as an automatic cutaway diagram tool and you'll instantly understand how it works.

However, I wouldn't parent the plane to the camera. A bit restrictive. Put just the plane where you want it to cutaway the geometry in your set and position a camera as you see fit.