Raytracing Lighting

Basic Light #

With Basic light as either a Omni and Spotlight you can enable raytracing shadows.

Turn raytracing on the root and enable shadow casting on the light.

Set shadow map type to Ray Traced.

Ray traced shadows produce accurate soft shadows

Area Light #

To use Area light: Turn raytracing on the root node then add an area light to the scene and set the light to ray traced in the attributes.

Once raytracing is enabled there are additional shadow attributes exposed.

A raytraced area light will give soft raytraced shadows as well as raytraced reflections.

Sky Light #

To enable raytracing in a Sky light, turn on raytracing on the root, then enable raytraced in the skylight attributes. Once enabled additional raytracing parameters will be available.

The skylight is a traditional dome light to which you can add hdr 360 images via the Environment Map node for a more realistic raytraced lit scene.

A raytraced skylight will reflect the skydome in geometry, whereas scene geometry will not be reflected although it will be occluded from the skydome reflections.

Bake Lighting #

You can use Baked lighting to bake raytraced lighting into lightmaps.

Baking raytraced static lighting into lightmaps is a great technique to improve the performance of a scene.