HELP MENTAL RAY INTERIORS (lighting)

[greenseed]

can anyone offer advice on how to use lighting in interiors consistenly using mentalray, thank you.

[SandmanNinja]

http://www.mentalboutmax.com

The ultimate Guru for mental ray lighting tutorials (in my opinion).

 

I have every MR tutorial Bri has done. They are full of information, patiently explained, and VERY affordable ($5-$10 is the average price).

 

'nuff said

 

 

 

ps: Welcome to the forums

[odouble]

Hey Seun, Joel's right. The mentalboutmax tutorials are great. You can also download the mentalray white paper on Arch Viz. Its a pretty informative piece to get you started.

http://images.autodesk.com/adsk/files/mental_ray_white_paper.pdf

[sconlogue]

What 3D app are you using? If it's Max 2010 there a number of suggestions I can make to get you in the right direction.

 

1. Use photometric lights (be careful with Shape/Area shadows. Anything other than "Point" will add to render time so only enable for lights that really need it. Also the bigger the "Shape" the longer the render time. The is especially true with large numbers of lights.

 

2. Make sure Final Gather is on (Should be on by default)

 

3. Use the archidesign shaders whenever possible. (they are much more flexible and tend to produce more realistic results)

 

4. Use a gamma of 2.2 (Should also be on by default I think) MR renders can often look "Washed out" when a lower gamma is used. Especially with the daylight system.

 

5. Use MR Photographic Exposure control.

 

6. When using the daylight system for interiors, be sure to add MR Sky Portals in windows and other openings to the outside. This focuses light energy more efficiently and creates ambient shadows which is a nice touch.

 

7. Try out the "Glare" camera shader. It's in the output slot in the "Renderer" tab. This saves on post work adding glare or glow and often gets better results. Just be careful since it blows out easily depending on exposure settings.

 

8. When animating be sure to create a Final Gather Map using the "Generate Final Gather Map File Now" option and then lock it so that all render nodes are using the same linear FGM. This avoid most FG flicker issues.

 

Here's my latest MR render using the methods mentioned above.

 

[sconlogue]

odouble, that's a great document there! Wish I had seen that one before. Lots of great tips, would have saved me some hair a few years ago. greenseed, read that top to bottom. Also if you have a multiple render nodes available to you distributed bucket render is your friend for more time consuming renders.

[DanGrover]

Another handy little hint that confused me for a while: If you want to use daylight system AND photometric lights, make sure you're using the mr photographic exposure (in Environment - 8) and then go down, check "unitless" and tap in about 80,000. That's roughly what you need to show up the photometric lights in a scene.