OpenUtilities Substation Help

Generating Enhanced Images with Effects Manager

You can create various visual effects in Effects Manager. You can experiment with different adjustments of floating point images settings and have amazing results. Following are some of the examples.

Ambient Occlusion

Ambient Occlusion means what areas of your model are hidden from ambient light in the scene. In other words, portions of your model which are shadowed.

Ambient Occlusion is also a predefined render setup. You can get the ambient occlusion render setup by clicking the down arrow on the Render Settings icon and selecting Ambient Occlusion from the drop-down menu. Then clicking Begin Luxology Render icon renders the model with the Ambient Occlusion render output.

Sketchy Image

You can create an illustrated look of your scene in Effects Manager by giving it a sketchy effect.

Stereo Effects Manager

Stereo images can be generated when two images are rendered and displayed as a side-by-side, cross-eyed stereo pair. The cross-eyed stereo is viewed by crossing your eyes until you see a stereo image appear between the two images. This method is referred to as free view because you do not need stereo glasses to see the stereo image.

Note: Stereo can only be used with the Luxology Render dialog. You can create stereo images that could be used with the Effects Manager by manually rendering these using Luxology dialog and then retrieving them from the history folder.

Spherical Panoramas

You can render images using a spherical camera. When these images are loaded to the Effects Manager, the display window shows a portion of the image as seen through a camera. You can click in the display window and drag to pan around. You can also use the mouse wheel to change the camera lens angle. When rendering spherical images for panoramas, you should set the views aspect to be 2:1. You need fairly high resolution images to look acceptable because you are only viewing a portion of the original image. 3000 x 1500 or 4000 x 2000 should provide good results. Higher resolution would be better, but due to memory limitations it is recommend that you use 4000 pixel wide images or less for your panoramas. When you save your image set from the Effects Manager dialog, an .efx file is automatically created and the Effects Manager is switched to Panorama View.

Note: To render a set of Spherical images, you need to turn on the `Use Spherical Camera Projection´ check box in the Render Setup Manager dialog.

If you render your image set from the Luxology dialog and retrieve the images from the history folder without an EFX file, there is no way to know whether or not the image is a spherical image. When loading spherical images you can use the Load Panorama Image Set tool.

When rendering a panorama, move your camera to a point in the room and not in a corner. When viewing panorama you will be able to look all around. Backing into a corner will not look good when you pan around and you are facing the wall or a corner.

Note: Visible Edges cannot be used when Use Spherical Camera Projection is selected. When rendering a spherical panorama, the wrap point or seam will be aligned with the current view´s target point. If you intend to apply bloom effects to lights, then you should set the camera up so that the camera target point is not near any lights that you intend to bloom.