ways to light a scene with particles?

[wannabeArtist]

Hi all,

I'm trying to create a fire effect with ICE and while there are a lot of fantastic examples of simulated flames, I haven't many (any?) that would actually light the scene with the fire.

How could this be done? I watched Oliver's cool flamethrower setup, where he gets indirect lighting from the flame, and I managed to get that to work, but how would one get direct light as well?

Thanks!

(Moderator edit - your URL contained quotation marks, I removed them - HB)

[Hirazi Blue]

(As always...) not sure, but maybe this can help:
Using point light instances in ICE

[wannabeArtist]

Thanks for the link!

I managed to get my point cloud to shoot photons as well!

Some tweaking must be done still, there's a lot of "no photons stored"-errors, as it probably fails for many of the particles, but some of them work producing a nice fireplace glow! I will see, if I can reduce the errors and the render time next...

[tuna]

Cool tip. It's so obvious once you know of it. AKA why didn't my dumbass brain think of this a year ago?

[wannabeArtist]

Hello again,

I spent most of yesterday tweaking this and it's starting to look nice, but there are a couple of issues still.

How do you setup GI, when rendering an animation? I tried to go through all the settings, but for some reason my photon maps (I think) fill the memory, until Windows refuses to continue. The accuracy and resolution are very modest, but it's like forgetting garbage collection. I rendered some 26 frames and spent most of my 8Gigs just for that. The memory is not released before I shut down XSI (I'm still using 7.01).

I tried both FG and GI separately and together. With FG it was easier and somewhat faster, but somehow I just love the idea of using photons more.

EDIT: Oh, and with either technique I couldn't get very much light into the room - actually it's just a cube for now. There's a small splash of light in front of the fireplace, but you can barely see the walls behind the fireplace. I was initially hoping to get nice dim lighting for the entire room, without burning (lol) the highlights in the fire. I tried using exposure control too, but it didn't really solve the problem.