Furniture Lighting in Radiosity Scene

[MegaPixel]

On the attached image (I know its small but ...) I've highlighted some troublesome furniture that doesn't appear to be absorbing light like the rest of my scene is. The entire scene is globaly meshed at 4" and this appears to work fine even for the small stuff in the background like dinner plates, candles and pictures.

 

These tables for some resaon, don't seem to respond well to increased mesh size or refined iterations. Is this a smoothing group issue? Do I need to apply the "Subdivide Modifier" trick on these items?

 

I'd love some advice. Basically, I'm trying to "nail" my lighting solution in grey shade phase first before I move onto the materialization phase. I think I'm really close.

 

Thanks - MegaPixel

[Fran]

Hi David,

 

Did you model those items yourself, or did someone else? You can try checking these things:

 

1. object properties for those items - look for overrides that will affect meshes or shadows.

 

2. check the objects for inverted normals or coplanar surfaces, but as you mentioned it could also be a smoothing issue.

[MegaPixel]

Thanks for the quick reply Fran (Your work is very inspirational!)

 

Actually, I did model these items myself, but I also modeled alot of the other objects in the scene which seem to be behaving ok. Some of these coffee tables were imported however and perhaps have some strange smooth group assignments because of it? I went through and double checked their individual properties to make sure all objects were on the same page and the appear to be.

 

The new rendering I attached is from the opposite angle of the original up top. The table objects appear to receive light better, atleast on the sides from this view. I also applied a subdivide modifier on the troubled objects for this render and it didn't seem to help. I'll go through and see if I can make sense of the smoothing groups on these surfaces.

 

I'm not very confident in my smoothing group abilities. I'd love some smooth group advice for finiky surfaces like this.

 

Thanks - Mega

[MegaPixel]

Ok, I did some things and rerendered the attached shots. I only did some minor smooth group tweaks and got the faces which are visible in the attached shot to behave correctly. I'm still having trouble on the back sides of these tables however which render flat black? I'm also wondering if Grouping objects is a bad idea? For some reason, when I ungrouped my entourage objects, I got completly different rendering results on them, even though their advanced lighting settings were the same as the grouped settings. (I think my ears are burning about not using Layers)

 

Anyhow, I think I'm close enough to continue on adding materials. I'd love some more advice though.

 

-Mega

[Fran]

Well, it looks like grouping was the problem here. What version of Max are you using?

[MegaPixel]

Fran, I'm using Max 7.5

 

I havn't had a chance to work the newer Layering system into my workflow. Is that the preferred method these days or is there something wrong with grouping?

 

Let me lay this question out there for you while I'm at it. Have you used the new Adaptive Subdivision Feature yet? I have tried it several times on the scene you see above and cannot get near the same results as I do globaly meshing. I tend to get crashes when shooting direct lights and the solve time is alot longer too.

 

Thanks for hanging in here with me Fran - Mega

[renato]

Adaptive meshing can be a real pain if you don't model following the "lightscape" method of modelling