Exterior and Interior in Kerkythea

[sutcac]

Just wanted to post these for critique and give a little plug for Kerkythea, which I am really enjoying. Any comments are welcome.

[manta]

very nice lighting...

[Dave Oliver]

the interior lighting is pretty good....

 

but it needs to be composed a little i think, you could set up areas of light and shadow within a single frame to really pop some elements out. if you check out the archinteriors preview renderings they are not really super complicated spaces for the most part but they get the most out of them through composition

[P.R.S. Sivakumar .]

Nice, at last some Kerkythea works in CG Architect Forum!

 

With best regards

PRSS

[sutcac]

Thanks for the comments. I got some feedback on the KT & ChiefTalk forums as well and definitely want to get back to it and try some of them out. Just need to find some time now.

 

This one actually made it onto the KT site's arch interiors slideshow.

 

KT ROCKS!

[Dave Buckley]

can i just ask, what were your render times for this?? and also how have you lit the interior??? is it just using the sky and sun, with self illuminating materials for the downlights???

 

i am just curious as currently learning myself.

 

i'm quite happy with the results, just the render times are far from fast

 

and also finding it hard to adjust to the fact that you select things by material, weird

 

only annoying thing i have found is the methods you have to take to create your own libraries, say for example i have just created another brick material and then want to save it to a brick library that i made a couple of weeks ago. Its a bit of nightmare.

 

also what is your workflow??

 

i am currently modelling in sketchup, export to KT, add materials and lights, render, then finish in photoshop.

 

i know that you can import KT materials into SketchUP, but i don't see the point if you are going to be exporting the model back into KT anyway

[Antisthenes]

Very nice Bryce

 

this is the FOSS render engine yes?

[sutcac]

Thanks again for the comments.

 

I start in Chief Architect, export to 3ds, import to Sketchup then export to KT (I am lobbying here and there for a direct exporter ). Sometimes I will do additional modeling and cleanup in SU, and of course place the sun to get my shadows where I want them.

 

With the beta SU2KT, you can choose to "Instance" on the export which gives you different options than selecting by material in KT but I have found this more difficult and time consuming. I just try and make sure I do as many of my materials in Chief first, and do some additional texture mapping in SU if I need to that I can't do in Chief. Also, knowing how KT works, I make sure and differentiate materials as necessary in order to select them that way in KT.

 

The lighting is all emitter surfaces for the can lights and the bulbs of the fixtures (one out of view behind and to the right). I have an invisible emitter plane outside the windows to the right to help fill in the lighting, and then just the sun.

 

Approximately a 12 hour render with MLT setting on a duo-core E6850 3ghz machine. But I do several small tests to make sure that everything is basically where I want it and then just let it run overnight. That's part of the art, trying not to have any big surprises.

 

Not sure if about the FOSS thing, it's Kerkythea and I am not much of a technical wonk.

[Antisthenes]

free open source software

[sutcac]

Thank you for the enlightenment. Yes, FOSS.

[Dave Buckley]

Well i can safely say you have done well, have you tested many of the render methods other than MLT, i know that Bidirectional Path Tracing is 'apparently' the way to go when rendering interiors, but i just wondered if you had experimented with others in terms of quality and speed.

 

can i just confirm that the only actual light source you have in there is the sun from sketchUP??? you don't have any physical sky in there or anything??? and also when creating light emitting materials, for your bulbs etc, do you check the box next to 'shadow caster'?

 

sorry for all the questions but ther is very little info out there, one final question, when doing the small test renders, i am assuming you lower the resolution first and then choose a quick preset, for example, photon mapping quick, to give you an idea of the final render????

[sutcac]

I did try the BDPT once, but didn't notice much difference in speed or qualit but I haven't experimented with it a lot. For a good while all I used was MLT for final renders but have come to find that in many instances custom PM settings (PM+FG and adjusting the other custom settings as opposed to using the presets) can be nearly as good, crisper and significantly shorter render times.

 

Yes, I will do a, say 320x240 in Photon Map Quick, just to get a good feel for the overall lighting before proceeding to longer renders.

 

As far as physical sky, I would say yes, I usually use one of the many "Globals" from the repository and then manually enter the sun settings from Sketchup. You can also insert you own custom global image after the fact while retaining the sun settings.

 

I have never checked "shadow caster", assumed this was the default unless unchecked?

 

Yes, with FOSS, the documentation and support is obviously tougher to come by, but I find their forum quite good. A lot of information is there, just not always the easiest to find.

[Dave Buckley]

haha check you using your newly found abbreviation in your vocabulary 'FOSS', sorry just messing, been following the thread.

 

but thanks a lot for the information, its really helpful.

 

i didn't realise the sketchup sun exports with the model, i've been adding a sun in KT

 

the reason i asked about the 'shadow caster' is because i just opened th KBall scene, and opened the emitter object material for editing and saw it was unchecked. it may well be checked by default not too sure.

 

with regards to globals, i haven't checked them out yet either, i am hoping that i will able to add background images in photoshop myself.

 

at the minute i am just using sun and the physical sky option and it seems to be working pretty well

[sutcac]

Oh yeah, I am a big wordie- If a learn a new word or cool acronym, gotta use it ten times so I don't forget it.

 

The thing about the physical sky, is that it seems to transfer that eerie blue/pink light into the scene too much. So the globals help with that too.

 

I assumed it's checked by default but not positive. I always notice they cast shadows, so I never really thought about it.

 

I feel like I've barely gotten waist deep into Kerky, but feel pretty good about the results.

[Dave Buckley]

cool, well i think that should be enough info to let me have a good stab at it.

 

oooo one final thing that springs to mind before i go to bed for the night, when adding light materials to planes outside the windows, do you create planes in sketchup (before export) or inside kerkythea using the vertical plane option??

 

i am just trying to do as much in sketchup as possible beforehand, so if i can put planes in window gaps before i export, then that would make it a bit easier to just apply a light material to once inside kerkythea

 

i will be taking the final renders into photoshop also afterwards, but i usually save as tiff out of 3ds max and vray. now that i am experimnting with sketchup and kt, i see that i no longer have the option to save the render as a tiff so that i don't lose quality through compression. what do you reccommend in terms of format?? PNG??

[sutcac]

I have done the emitter planes both ways. You can certainly make them in SU, but sometimes, especially for ones outside shining light in through windows, etc., you don't always know you're going to need one until you're in KT and do a test render.

 

In SU, you can name the material LightEmit[x], where X is the power of the light when it gets into KT. But adjusting the power after the fact is finicky. I think I only do this when I know I want a surface to be an emitter, but it's almost as easy to just make sure the surface doesn't share a material name with something else and assign it Diffuse Light in KT. Sometimes when you try and adjust this in KT, the light just winks out and becomes not a light. You can just reassign it to Diffuse Light again and it comes back on. Hard to explain and a bit of a bug I think.

 

Not sure about the image. Isn't BMP uncompressed? Odd they don't have the TIFF option and didn't even realize it till now. So, you taught me something too!