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So, tonight’s update has no discernible change (other than the addition of the dorsal phaser strip) from the previous, despite representing two evenings’ worth of intensive work! First, the pretty renders:
And now the technical explanation of WTF. It turns out that Cycles, in order to be faster, has a somewhat imprecise ray-to-triangle intersection algorithm. This manifested on Coro here in the form of the light from the interiors leaking through polygon seams! It wasn’t too bad at high light levels, but in dark renders it looked terrible. On a hunch, I decided to see what would happen if I fully enclosed the room objects, giving them an interior wall1 with inward-facing normals to ray-intersect with the emitted light. Much to my relief, this actually worked like a charm! Of course, it was also a huge pain in the butt to vertex-snap all of the interior walls to the inside edge of the window inset, hence why it’s taken me two evenings to do!
Here’s a before/after image with the exposure cranked way up.
Let this be a lesson to any Blender folks out there who plan to put rooms behind their windows!
- instead of making them more like open TV sets [↩]