Image Based Lighting
There's a whole new implementation of the
Image Based Lighting system in Turtle 4, so
let's check it out and see how it works. You've
probably already been using final gathering
with a texture mapped sky light for high
quality renders. IBL is very similar, but there
are some differences between the two that are
important to know about when you're
choosing the weapon for your next project.
When using final gathering, the sky light is sampled by brute-force, and you often have to blur the environment texture to avoid noise in the final image. Image Based Lighting instead analyzes the image instead, and stratifies it in a smart way so that bright areas get sampled more by Turtle. IBL by itself generates higher quality shadows than an equivalent final gathering set-up.