AI Light

The OctaneRender® AI Light is designed to learn the scene that it is rendering and improve its sampling strategy over the course of rendering the image. The AILight provides a great improvement in light sampling, especially in scenes that have many lights with localized distributions. As a learning system, the AI Light improves as more samples are rendered. The learning is all done in the renderer itself — it is fully unbiased and tracks emissive points live and in real time. When used with Adaptive Sampling, AI Light gets even better, since it will learn that other lights become more important, as some pixels are no longer sampled.

Note
GI clamp is a biased clamping method used to reduce over-bright pixels (fireflies), therefore it is possible the use of GI clamp can result in slightly different brightness in parts of the image between the old light sampling and AI Light.

AI Light-智能灯光 - 图1

TESTING THE AI LIGHT

To test the AI light, make a setup as you see in the image below (the scene is from the content browser of Cinema 4D.) The lights on the floor were created with cloner and cloner cubes have an emissive material (Blackbody emission, explained in this section.)

In the test, 128 samples were used to render, both with AI Light on and off. The difference is obvious when AI light is on.

AI Light-智能灯光 - 图2

The AI Light can make smoother and cleaner renderings as the number of samples increases. Just as we explained in AI Denoiser, “data” is needed for AI to learn the scene and work efficiently. That’s exactly what the AI Light does. If you use AI denoiser and/or Adaptive sampling, you can achieve much better results with fewer samples required than if the AI light and Adaptive sampling are not used. In the image below, AI Light and AI Denoiser are used together. The following scene obviously needs more samples, but AIs have done their job properly.

AI Light-智能灯光 - 图3

AI LIGHT SETTINGS

AI LIGHT (ON OR OFF)

This enables AI lighting. AI Light option is useful when the scene has complex lighting, for example a large scene with many lights individually affecting a small local area in direct light coupled with the light emitters having a lot of polygons.

AI LIGHT UPDATE (ON OR OFF)

Enables dynamic AI light update. This adaptively updates the light selection in direct light sampling, to help learn the current scene and where the lights are in that scene. For example, in cases where there is a wall completely occluding the light (thus, the light has no effect in the given camera angle/position), AI Light Update will understand that it does not need to sample this light.

AI LIGHT STRENGTH

This option is used to adjust the strength for dynamic AI light update (available in Direct Lighting Kernel only).