Lighting: Exterior but with lots of interior showing

[comedypedro]

First post here, hi all.

 

Ive been using MAX for ages for exterior stuff, not really architectural, more like playgrounds and sporting grounds etc. so Ive no real experience with interiors. Attached are some scenes from an office type building project Im working on. Theres a lot of windows so any close up exterior is going to show a lot of interior to.

 

I'm basically trying to get to grips with sky portals.

 

Ive done simple practice scenes with 1 or skyportals but can anyone suggest strategies for this project? For the side of the building I experimented with one big one, which rendered fairly fast and with smaller in each plane of glass (over 50 portals!) which rendered not so fast. For each smaller portal though I did drop the photons to 500.

 

Theres attached scenes of the front door both with and without portals. Without them does look kind of cool, the glass looks tinted which looks nice but not the effect I'm after! But on the portals scene, yes theres light getting into the interior but look at the wall to the left of the leftmost window, no matter how small I make the portals they always blow out whatever geometry is near them. Also theres glare on the frames in the fully interior scene.

 

For all these scenes I'm using mr Photographic exposure with the daylight exterior preset (max 2009) FG for the non portal scenes, FG&GI for the portal scenes. Im using the exterior preset even for the fully interior scene as I dont want the exterior to get blown out.

 

EDIT: also the multipliers on the portals where at 50

Edited December 11, 2009 by comedypedro

[TheAllusionisst]

Lighting does not look like you are using a physical sun and sky system as it is very dark. If you are then your materials must be really dark, are you using gamma correction (LUT settings?) on textures? Try rendering (using material overide option in render settings) with a ArchDesign default material with glossiness and reflection turned way down (flat or eggshell finish per say) and see what the lighting solution looks like without your materials.

[comedypedro]

Yeah Im using daylight system (mrSun & mrSky) and gamma set to 2.2 for maps and display. Renders attached as suggested, one with portals on, one with off. Glass geometry is hidden.

[TheAllusionisst]

Are you using a hemisphere or skydome with the physical sun and sky? Your sky isn't right and if you are using a noise map to fake clouds it may be affecting the lighting, I would save as a new scene and delete the mrSun & mrSky and then create them again via "Create" => "System"........ and see what you get, things don't look right.

[comedypedro]

Interior, portals on, FG+GI, exposure value 15, I moved the sun lower to shine more light inside but still pretty dark.

[comedypedro]

Yeah I had a smoke map for clouds, it was switched of in the interior render above though and its still dark

[TheAllusionisst]

Your sky doesn't look right, that is not the default mrSky. Sorry, but it would be hard to try and trouble shoot when it looks like you have variables in there outside of the default physical sky and sun. Good luck!