Direct or indirect?

[ahmadun]

I want to understand more, about direct lights and indirect lights.
What are included in direct lights?
What are included in indirect lights?
Thanks a lot.

[SimonLarsen]

As far as i know, any light can be both direct and indirect light.
Indirect light, is when the light isn't coming directly from the lightsource, but is bounced off another surface before hitting it.

In an exterior scene, you would normally have a lot of direct lighting, where in an interior scene with sun, the light enters a window and bounces around and there is a lot of indirect lighting.

If you aren't sure what to use in a scene, just use hybrid mode. It works great. ^^

[StompinTom]

light is light is light, whether it is emitted, reflected, refracted, bent, raped, filtered or put through a woodchipper.

the thing about Indigo is there is no real separation between direct and indirect light in terms of the final look of things. for example, you can use a white diffuse plane as a lightsource if its bouncing light from the sun or a lightbulb into a darkened room. that would be indirect light, but it functions pretty much exactly the same way as if you were to make it a light-emitting plane. it becomes a game of figuring out what is faster processor/sampling-wise and thats where CG in general cuts corners, Indigo less so than most renderers.

correct me if im wrong, but thats how i understand it, hope it helps!

[Kram1032]

Yeah, as explained above, Indirect light is when it doesn't hit the camera at the very first bounce (or actually if the camera-ray doesn't find a light source at the very first bounce...) It's slower than direct light but in any scene you show me, you'll have both lights if you don't show a blank scene with just, let's say, sun&sky...

[ahmadun]

Thanks for all...

[Deus]

direct light is when you get light directly. Indirect light is if its passed through intermediate agents or other shady things