FAQ - Questions need good answers!

[atmmatt]

I need your help!

POLL: I am thinking of keeping the main FAQ simple and the most general questions and answers. However I have noticed many questions pop up now and again like "my image is too dark, help?" or "my image is grainy and it rendered for 10 minutes?". There are a lot of these good questions with simple answers but would clog up the main FAQ and I think make it confusing for newcomers to trot through all of that. Anyways if you would like to see a subsection with all the small good questions and answers please vote yes. Also if you vote yes and have some of those little Q&A please post them here also.

I am looking for good simple answers to some posted FAQ questions. The answer doesn't have to be anything fancy just something simple and I will do the rest. If you have other suggestions for things that should be in the FAQ please post them here and they will be included.

Here are a few of the ones that I'm hoping for a good technical answer but keeps it simple enough for the beginner.

Does Indigo support AO / Global illumination / Caustics / Photon mapping / DOF ?

(maybe if you can say, yes ao, yes gi etc and also say, ao is bla bla bla)

How is Indigo different from yafray ?

What is BiDir?

What is MLT?

How does Indigo's render get better as time goes on?


I will add more questions that I can think of but please post anything and everything to make it as comprehensive as possible!

P.S. Please look over the FAQ and point anything out that is either wrong or could be better.

Thanks
-Matt

[arneoog]

Keep it simple

Does Indigo have a Material Database?
Please visit Indigo Material Database to see a list of materials supported by users. You may also contribute your own materials to this database

That site/db is just something I use to get it tested, it is far from finish.
And when it is finish it will be added to this server, also integrated into the new design
I don't want people to add stuff to this DB, it's just my little testing field

Just so you know

[atmmatt]

My bad, thanks for the heads up! I saw it a few days ago and thought it was different.

[Phil]

Hi, atmmatt,

I hope I can help you with this little reply, I just answer because of another post with logs informations.

So my questions would be:

How shoul I understand the logs?

What means the informations under:

(this is an extract, it is not complete)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
-----------TriTree::build()-------------
317608 tris.
temp tris mem usage: 10.904MB
intersect_tris mem usage: 14.539MB
calcing root AABB.
max tree depth: 38
total nodes used: 2667201 (20.349MB)
total leafgeom size: 2635452 (10.053MB)
finished building tree.
Done.
What means the informations under:

-----------ObjectTree::build()-------------
5 objects.
calcing root AABB.
AABB: (-300.000000, -300.000000, -300.000000), (300.000000, 300.000000, 421.955383)
max tree depth: 6
reserving N nodes: 5(40B)
total nodes used: 13 (104B)
total leafgeom size: 10 (40B)
finished building tree.
Finished initialisation
RendererSettings::getInstance().bidirectional: 1
RendererSettings::getInstance().metropolis: 1
Starting threads... (num threads: 1)
Starting thread...(RNG seed=974232249)
doing initial warmup...
done initial warmup.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
A lot of subquestions of course:
-----------------
What is this?
calcing root AABB.
-----------------
What is this?
doing initial warmup...
done initial warmup.

And so on....

(sorry for my poor english, I even not be sure that I understood everything in zour post!)

I hope this helps

regards, Phil

[me1]

it means that it is building the scene from the xml. the last part is indigo warming up. (like a printer)

[Phil]

sorry,

I am not good enough in english to understand what you mean with this:

it means that it is building the scene from the xml. the last part is indigo warming up. (like a printer)

Please, could zou develop zour answer, this will help me, thanks!

regards, Phil

[me1]

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
-----------TriTree::build()-------------
317608 tris.
temp tris mem usage: 10.904MB
intersect_tris mem usage: 14.539MB
calcing root AABB.
max tree depth: 38
total nodes used: 2667201 (20.349MB)
total leafgeom size: 2635452 (10.053MB)
finished building tree.
Done.
What means the informations under:

-----------ObjectTree::build()-------------
5 objects.
calcing root AABB.
AABB: (-300.000000, -300.000000, -300.000000), (300.000000, 300.000000, 421.955383)
max tree depth: 6
reserving N nodes: 5(40B)
total nodes used: 13 (104B)
total leafgeom size: 10 (40B)
finished building tree.
Finished initialisation
RendererSettings::getInstance().bidirectional: 1
RendererSettings::getInstance().metropolis: 1
Starting threads... (num threads: 1)
Starting thread...(RNG seed=974232249)
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The above is indigo making the scene so it can render it.




-----------------
doing initial warmup...
done initial warmup.
-----------------
This just means that indigo is getting ready to render.

[atmmatt]

Thanks guys!

Phil I would like to make some Q&A for the logs but on maybe a simple level. I am also thinking maybe someone else with some more technical knowledge can go through line by line and say this does this and that does that. Maybe all of that can be put onto a page and included as a seperate FAQ part. I will start working on it soon!

Sorry all for my late response, I've been sick for a while now and haven't been getting better just worse. The computer makes the headache much worse so I've only been checking in very briefly lately. Going to the doctors now and hopefully soon will be getting better! I haven't abandoned the FAQ just will need some more time to work on it.

Please everyone, if you have anything that you think can be included especially into the specialized section, please post it up I would really appreciate the input!

[Adam Guzowski]

Im not sure it was pointed already but I got something about "What is MLT ?"

According to polish Ph.D Marcin Chajac work...

"MLT-Metropolis Light Transport, is one of 3 basic algorithms from Monte Carlo method. Using this method allows to visualize all aspects of lights transportation in global lighting.Other two algorithms are 'Path Tracing' and 'Bidirectional Path Tracing'"