ray-count information without normalisation
Posted: Sun May 19, 2019 1:42 am
My use case: I research the light usage of living organisms. I have a decent amount of experience quantifying visible light radiation (specifically photosynthetically available radiation - PAR) across the surface (both incident and reflected light) of complex shapes/living tissue arrangements. However, I am very new to 3D modelling. Luxcorerender however could prove to be very useful for my work!!!
I have started using photogrammetry to produce 3D models of my organisms of interest. For now I am looking for a way to correlate the mean number of rays per pixel of a render of a small area of the mesh (imaging the camera zoomed into a target area) versus what I have measured in real life using a micro PAR-meter. My approach (in blender) is to set up a scene with the sun in the right position in the sky relative to the mesh, create around 10 individual cameras throughout the scene that span exposed (high-light) to occluded (low-light) areas, switch between each camera, using luxcore to render each image for an equal amount of time (or could be equal number of samples or noise threshold) so that image pixels and their values can be directly compared. I was then thinking to output the raycount per pixel AOV, and compare the mean number of rays per pixel of each render, first to one another, and then second, to the measured real-life PAR values. However I now realise that raycount is normalised between 0 and 1, which is not useful for comparisons of raycounts between individual renders. I would need the non-normalised values.
Do you have any advice of how I might go about either retrieving the non-normalised ray counts of each render, or some other solution that would allow me to directly compare between renders as described above?
Thank you for your incredible work with LuxCoreRender!
I have started using photogrammetry to produce 3D models of my organisms of interest. For now I am looking for a way to correlate the mean number of rays per pixel of a render of a small area of the mesh (imaging the camera zoomed into a target area) versus what I have measured in real life using a micro PAR-meter. My approach (in blender) is to set up a scene with the sun in the right position in the sky relative to the mesh, create around 10 individual cameras throughout the scene that span exposed (high-light) to occluded (low-light) areas, switch between each camera, using luxcore to render each image for an equal amount of time (or could be equal number of samples or noise threshold) so that image pixels and their values can be directly compared. I was then thinking to output the raycount per pixel AOV, and compare the mean number of rays per pixel of each render, first to one another, and then second, to the measured real-life PAR values. However I now realise that raycount is normalised between 0 and 1, which is not useful for comparisons of raycounts between individual renders. I would need the non-normalised values.
Do you have any advice of how I might go about either retrieving the non-normalised ray counts of each render, or some other solution that would allow me to directly compare between renders as described above?
Thank you for your incredible work with LuxCoreRender!