Home Interior (Mental Ray)

[joevallard]

This is the interior of the house I'm living in, try to learn about global illumination. Those are the settings that I used, probably not perfect but came out with okay results. One question i have is, if you take a look at the last picture all the other rooms are blacked out. Is there anyway i could get these light up too?

[Tommy Burns]

I would say your photon radius is too small increase it to cover all of the rooms

Hope this helps

[art.chitect]

Add.....

 

I think You can try to add mr Sky Portal on Window, so it can support to give some photons as well..

[Tommy Burns]

This won't do any good as there is no roof on the building??

Portals are to spread photons into rooms through windows, door openings

[Justin Hunt]

But dont let this limit you in how they can be implemented. Portal lights are area lights on steroids and as such can be used are area lights.

 

The roof can be a single plane bith "Backface cull" on and the normals pointed into the room.

 

As to the Photon Radius, may I suggest you re-read the manual, this has nothing to do with the size of the room, but rather the size of the area a photon must sample. Too big and detail is lost, too small and 1000000000000000......'s of photons are needed.

 

jhv

[joevallard]

I'm using 3ds max 9, portal lights were not introduced until max 2008 if I'm correct.

 

There is a roof if you look at the first picture. Its only one sided, but even from a top view no lighting is passing through the top.

[Tommy Burns]

Well then why not take the roof away for the last image and let the photons in that way?

[joevallard]

The view from the top was just to show the rooms not being lite up.

Check this picture, when your viewing this room, the back hallway and kitchen are practically blacked out. I'm trying to get light into these rooms.

[Justin Hunt]

Question, what type of lights are you using? If not a daylight system try it.

 

Try this

 

GI

 

Drop the Photon multiplier back to 1, Play with you exposure control to brighten the scene rather than using the multiplier.

Increase the Max Trace Depth to 20

Turn on "All objects Generate ... GI"

 

Final Gather

 

Set the Diffuse bounces back to 0, when using GI, Final Gather only needs the first bounce and any more are discarded at render time. FG is used to "Clean up" and smooth out the GI Solution.

 

If there is glass in the window, hide it.

 

As to the back rooms, what you have is correct, although not pleasing to the eye. Ether add a light in each room or if you are not concerned about breaking the laws of physics, play with the Final Gather Max Fall off Distance. Small numbers are brighter and larger numbers darker.

 

jhv

Edited October 26, 2008 by Justin Hunt

[joevallard]

OK got some time to work on this today, being playing with a few things.

Here is a clay rendering of the GI I've got now. Got the kitchen lite up