AI Light is a lighting algorithm in Octane implemented so that there is no difference in the resulting rendered image for unbiased rendering. It is designed to learn the scene that it is rendering and improve its sampling strategy over the course of rendering the image. However, note that GI clamp is a biased clamping method used to reduce fireflies, therefore it is possible the use of GI clamp can result in slightly different brightness in parts of the image between the old light sampling and AI Light.
Octane’s Artificially Intelligent Light provides a great improvement in light sampling, especially in scenes that have many lights with localised distributions. As a learning system, AI Light improves as more samples are rendered. The learning is all done in the renderer, it is fully unbiased and tracks emissive points live and in real time. When used with Adaptive SamplingA method of sampling that determines if areas of a rendering require more sampling than other areas instead of sampling the entire rendering equally., AI Light gets even better, since it will learn that other lights become more important, as some pixels are no longer sampled.
Figure 1: AI Light controls are accessed via the Light section of the Kernel settings.
AI Light
This enables AI lighting. AI Light option is useful when the scene has complex lighting, for example a large scene with a lot of lights individually affecting a small local area in direct light coupled with the light emitters having a lot of polygons.
AI Light Update
Enables dynamic AI light update. This adaptively updates the light selection in direct light sampling, to help learn the current scene and where the lights are in that scene. For example, in cases where there is a wall completely occluding the light (thus, the light has no effect in the given camera angle/position), AI Light Update will understand that it does not need to sample this light.
AI Light Strength
This is used by the Direct Lighting Kernel to adjust the strength for dynamic AI light update.
Figure 2: A test scene containing 1247 emitting quads - without AI Light on the left, and AI Light enabled on the right, for a total of 50 samples per pixel
Note: Scenes rendered using versions V3.x.x and earlier, will not have AI light attributes, thus these attributes will need to be explicitly set in the Kernel settings when the scenes are opened in Octane by enabling AI Light update.