A couple quick ones

[pixelperfectg]

When I crank up the Output shader enough to get the lighting, it blows out the color of the teapot to white. Anybody know a way to do it without that happening?

I think Justin's idea is about the only solution for that scenario. Sure, you can play around with the exposure settings, but that would mess up your lighting in the room.

 

It's similar to taking a photo of a brightly lit lightbulb and wanting to see the color of the bulb, and still have proper illumination in the room. You'd have to adjust your camera's exposure settings for either the room, or the lightbulb. I think it would be difficult, if not impossible to do with one photo...but I'm not a photographer, so I may be wrong...it's just my thoughts.

[Greg McDowell]

My polygon count (i.e. faces) is 192,138... I don't think that's "high." I've got 4 gigs of RAM and dual Intel P4's running at 3.8 GHz so not a slow system by any means.

[AJLynn]

Yeah, that's pretty weird. It's under 200,000 polys - that's not very high. Want to post a sample scene and we can compare?

[AJLynn]

A question about lights-

 

If I've got a scene where there's a wide hallway with windows on the right and up/down pendant fluorescents on the left, any advice on how to do the pendants? Would the optimal way be to model the bulb or lens, give it an output shader, set it to non shadow casting and also put in an IES light?

[Justin Hunt]

I wouldn't bother about the output shader on a bulb as the ies lights will take care of the light.

 

You could go with either, both could be overkill.

 

JHV

[AJLynn]

I mean for when you can see the lens or bulb.

[Justin Hunt]

I got that, yes model the bulb and lens but dont bother with the output shader

 

JHV

[AJLynn]

Okay, I'll try that. Thanks.

[pixelperfectg]

I didn't want to post this in a new thread, so I hope you don't mind that I put it here. It's just a few test renders at various times of the day, nothing fancy...just figured I'd do something with the images before deleting them.

http://jeffpatton.net/Temp/mr-sun-sky.jpg (large"ish" image)

[Justin Hunt]

Very nice, I really like the 4pm image, the colours be beautiful.

 

As promised a while ago here is an interior I am working on. Physical sun and sky and a couple pf downlights. too 3.5hrs to render at 2500px wide (image sampling at 4, 16)

 

Very please with it although there af a few things to fix

 

JHV

[AJLynn]

Jeff- Good ones. I like coloring in sun/sky renders that really brings out the two components of the lighting. (I'm amazed at how how people - architects and illustrators who should know this stuff - don't get that about daylight.)

 

Justin- I like that shot a lot, but some of the furniture looks a bit floating, especially the chairs. Maybe AO on the floor material would help? Also the towel doesn't look quite right yet. Good lighting and the render time's pretty impressive, I remember last year struggling to get mr to do anything with good GI and some raytracing in less than 20 hours. I guess it also helps that I can run it on a computer that's 5x as fast as what I was using then. What hardware was that on?

[Justin Hunt]

Agree about the chairs and the blanket was an experiment that I dont think will stay. I needed something to brake up the couch.

 

Spec's of the machine arn't that great, P4 3ghz, 2 gig Ram. I would like to run this one on my new core2duo, maybe over the weekend.

 

I have had more success with Mental than I did with Vray, which at its best did this scene in 7 hours and looked much worse though. I will be sticking with Mental for now;)

 

JHV