New SEN school

[alfienoakes]

I am having a few problems with this one..

I have switched back to Scanline from VRAY free, and I cannot seem to get my materials right.

I need to be carefull with the amount of detail I include, as this is going to be an animation.

Now as I understand it, I cannot use VRAY FREE for animations on a render farm.. Is this correct..?

Anyhow, I have set up my materials, and they look really flat. Also, on the shot with the canopy over, the paving at ground level, will not show correctly. It is not in shadow as it should be.

Also, the wall at the back under the canopy is completely dark.. I cannot seem to figure out why these things are happening.

If anyone has any clues or comments, I would love to hear.

Viz 2006 and Radiosity by the way..

Cheers

Andy

[Jason Matthews]

Hey Andy. Can you post your settings? From what I see, it looks like you do not have any meshes on the objects. If you do they are really large because there is no evidence of them having any effect on the building. The ground looks too saturated. If you are using a diffuse map go in and change the levels within the map from 1.0 to say.75 or so. You will have yo play with this value.

 

Are you using the daylight system? IMHO it is better than standard lights. Also make sure you have logrythmic exposure control and not another kind. Is you filtering on? If so set it to 0 and work the refinements instead. Then come back and adjust the filtering.

 

As for your materials, go back and check to make sure that the reflectance values are correct. You might find yourself using advanced override materials a lot to make up for color bleeding and oversaturation.

 

Like I said post your setting so we can see.

[alfienoakes]

Cheers Jason..

 

My settings are as follows:

 

Log' Exposure Control,

Brightness 60 / contrast 50

Physical Scale 96000 (as intensity of Sunlight)

 

Lights in scene: only Daylight system (IES Sun & IES Sky)

Ray traced shadows

 

Must admit, I have the filtering set to 1 at the minute..

 

I am just about to change a few of the Output settings on the materials, and see how it looks.

 

 

Thanks for looking

 

Andy

 

Sorry, the mesh is set at 1000mm at the minute for testing..

[JamesTaylor]

Andy,

 

you can use Vray free for animations and in conjunction with backburner, at least you could 12 months ago, the limitation will be that you can't do GI as you'll need to precalc the IRR map.

 

However, using vray without the GI can still produce decent result, blurred shadows / reflections etc just need to up the light values as there will be no bounces being calculated.

 

have a play, see what you think - i seem to remember it being faster tha Radiosity and IMHO gave a better result

 

James

[alfienoakes]

Cheers James,

 

Will have a play at some point, but I need to have this one finsihed by next week, so I am sort of stuck on this route..

 

Back to scanline..!

 

Andy

[alfienoakes]

OK,

 

Check this out.. The original pictures were a file that had the building xref'd into the scene in VIZ (viz xref's)

 

Now the building on its own worked fine as a VIZ drawing, lights etc..

 

So, I removed the building from the site file, and xref'd the site into the building scene.. (which had a daylight system up and running)

 

And it works..?

 

So, I will be working it this way, even though the systems in each file were identical.

 

Think some prevoius light settings in the site scene must have confused it..!

 

Andy

[Jason Matthews]

Very odd. At least you found the fix. Change the physical scale to 1500 for the sun. You really don't need to adjust this unless you have other lights in the scene. Your new scene doesn't seem bright enough for those hard shadows. Try using shadow map shadows with the size set to about 1024 and the bias to about 15 or so. Higher bias equals more spread out shadows. If you want hard shadows change the size higher. This can help render times. I think your glass is almost too reflective. Tone it back a bit.

 

I guess the main issue is the meshing. More real = tighter mesh = higher refinements = longer render times.

 

Keep going. I am eagar to see where this goes.

[Tim Saunders]

did you get the pavement issue worked out? i have never had any good luck with those type of stripes. yeah it saves on geometry and all, but I always have better luck with physical lines. what kind of material are those metal staggered panels made of? could use some speculars. i have found that to make any scene come to life, it is by reflection. even if done by specular hilights. it would give some deffinition to those panels. i hope you have a way to post the animation when your done.

[alfienoakes]

Cheers guys,

 

I have brightened it up a bit, and toned down the glass, but today seem to have spent most of the day trying to fix other machines.. then re importing my whole site into VIZ, as a fresh file link rather than a VIZ xref..!

 

Bloody programme cant make its mind up what it wants to work best with!!!

 

Anyway, I didn't know about the Physical Scale setting, I always thought that it should be set to the brightest light in the scene..? Well tried it, and it looks OK..

 

I am sticking with ray traced shadows, as I can get the frame times down to between 1 - 2 minutes, as long as I sort the Maxquadtreedepth parameter out..( which I remebered this morning!!)

 

The paving slabs, I always use the tile pattern, as its so quick and easy, and cut out soo much geometry..

 

Anyway, here is where its at as of 5.45pm, and have to go now, but hope to really pull this along tomorrow..

 

Cheers guys,

 

Andy

[Jason Matthews]

The glass looks much better. I would add an environvment reflection to the glass though. Something still seems strange with the color of the walls. Try changing the tiled concrete ground into an advanced override material and reduce the color bleed so your walls aren't pinkish. I also feel that the concrete on the walls need more texture to them. The seem kind of flat right now. Or matbe the need a smaller mesh. Is the wood paneling supposed to be that reflectant? Seems like a render time killer. And finally the pavement is odd. Almost like the bump map is doing all the work or something. Search around for more textures and try to stay away from blend maps because of render times.

 

I really like the feel of the project. The composition between horizontal concrete and punched window openings is nice. I might be inclined to add a tad more blue to the skylight ant perhaps change it from 1.0 to like 1.3 or so just to get less harsh shadows.

 

Keep it up.

[alfienoakes]

Cheers Jason..

 

I'm going home now.. been a long week..!

 

Should have this wrapped up next week.. so back on it then, hopefully with some finished results.

 

Andy