[drdoe]

I'm modeling my own living room (just for fun), and I want to render it as it looks when lit only by the light coming thru the windows. But in order for that to happen, the light needs to be reflected by the white walls and the floor an such.
How do I acomplish that? Setting reflections for the textures just makes everything light up a bit, but of course then everything also reflects obejct geometries (which a wall usually doesn't)...

[rich_is_bored]

In real life a single light source can illuminate an entire room. The reason this happens is because the light bounces around. This effect is called radiosity.

You've got two options. You can either fake it by adding small lights all over or you can enable radiosity and turn up the number of bounces.

The only downside to using radiosity is it slows down your renders trememdously. Also, the more bounces the longer it takes to render.



The above image is an example of increasing the number of bounces.

[drdoe]

Of course!
I know about the radiosity function, but I've never really known what it did. So far I've used it to give renderings a slighty grainy look, because that was all I could see it it doing. I kinda figured that radiosity was built to be a grain-filter, but I had no idea what... I'm such a n00b

Thnx for the answer!

[HAZCHEM]

Hey man if your geting a grainy image you can enable HDR exposure in Image Editor under Processing --> Add Filter and alos i think you have to enable it in Image Processing also try bluring your image that you using by enableing Full Percision Blur in Image Editer under, filters.

And rember if you want radiosity to work the best you will have to use a HDRI image. Hope that helps.

[drdoe]

thnx the the info, hazchem

However, I actually like the grainy quality I often get with radiosity so I don't think I'll mess with it this time around