Need some help with lighting

[R.Stewart]

Hi,

 

I'll just point out the main issues first:

 

1. I'm getting noise on the walls and I don't know why.

 

2. It seems to be very bright outside and very dark inside.

 

3. The tiles look very wrong. What can be done? It's a really good quality image.

 

I'm using FG on draft. I'm not using GI and I'd like to keep it that way because I have to animate this so render time is an issue. I did try to use GI and it calculated photons till the cows came home and was saying can't count over 1000000 photons or something. I googled it and apparently it's to do with caustics but I had no objects emitting or recieving caustics. What els could it be?

 

Can someone just give me some standard settings to make this work?

 

I'm using mr sun and tried to keep all of the settings default as possible. I tried turning down the burn factor in the exposure control but it didn't do anything.

 

I look forward to your reply.

 

Thank you,

 

Richard

Edited August 24, 2011 by R.Stewart

[datacrasher]

1) Where is the noise? if you do a walk through of your room when your in the p.view you can show us up close because with that far away render we cannot see it.

 

2) I always use active shade when setting up the lights because max will automatically update your scene when you increase/decrease the lights.

 

Why are you using the protons? unless you want to reflect something all around the room maybe that's causing the nose if you switch the protons off does the noise go away?

 

try adding a UVW map to your stack and changing the tiling on the floor

 

IMO I would add a yellowish light to make it look warmer

 

Tony

Edited August 24, 2011 by datacrasher

[AubreyM]

Turn up your initial FG point density a bit.

Try upping the FG diffuse bounces, usually it should be at least 4.

Increase the Rays per FG point a little at a time until you get the balance you are looking for between speed and quality.

Also if you are not using it already try the MR photographic exposure control.

[R.Stewart]

Thanks guys I'll have a play with it tonight and I'll let you know how it goes.

 

: )

[R.Stewart]

1)

 

2) I always use active shade when setting up the lights because max will automatically update your scene when you increase/decrease the lights.

 

Hey I forgot all about active shade. What a geat tool. It's not working for me though. I did a couple of tutorials and I'm getting some very different results.

 

When I hit active shade to update the window, a window pops up named 'raytrace messages' and it says

 

RayFX Raytrace Engine v5.02

© 1998-2000 Blur Studio Inc.

---------------------------------------------------

 

Waiting for trace request...

 

Frame complete.

Rays traced: 0

-----------------------

 

and the window displays black with the liquid in the martini glasses glowing and a few stripes of light over to the side. Very odd. I've had a look through the settings and googled the daylights out of it but cant find an answere. I made a new scene with just a box to play with active shade and the viewport looked fine as in I could see the box with the lighting and everything but I was still gettting the anoying raytrace window pop up. Do you know what I could do to make it work in my scene?

 

Oh and with the photons. Is it not a good idea to use GI inside to help light up the dark areas?

 

Thank you for your help,

 

Richard

[R.Stewart]

Oh and you can't see the noise on the bulk head? There's a definite dark patch on it. ha probably not much but it bother me a little.

[datacrasher]

Richard

Your all over the place with the last two messages: you should only use the protons when you want to reflect something around the room: example let say you have a swimming pool with water built inside a room then you can use the protons and caustics to reflect the water around on the walls.

 

I am not sure how the active shade works on the newer versions of max cos i am only using max 9.

 

I did not know a building how a bulk head i thought that was only ships.

 

are you using MR or scanline render? i am not sure what will work with your scene. If you upload some image maybe we can help more. IMO you need to stay on track because i found this message confusing

 

Tony

[Justin Hunt]

@Datacrasher, not so, Photons are a very effective GI lighting method, not just for caustics.

 

@regular , can you post your render and lighting settings. For the tiles maybe some bump and specular maps to add detail

 

jhv

[R.Stewart]

Hi, very sorry I'll try to be more concise with my writing.

 

 

Here are my render, FG and exposure settings along with a new render. It's getting better but it is still far too dark in the shaded areas as you can see near the dining table. It is also far too bright near the window where the light is coming in.

 

The render is taking 15 minutes to render, half the time spent computing FG.

 

I really need to get this Active shade working it seems to be an invaluable tool. I've posted a picture of the active shade window showing black and white. Any ideas?

 

Oh and the speckles on the wall below the painting and under the coffee table are undesirables that I can't get rid of.

 

I'm using 3ds max 2012 with mental ray.

 

Thank you so much for your help guys. Any other advice would be well received.

 

Richard

[datacrasher]

I won't help with the new active shade because i don't know how to use it In the older max all you had to do was when it from the p.view and it will automatically display your render. Maybe ask someone in the autodesk forum

 

I think you'll never get rid of the speckles because that's apart of final gather

 

It look pretty good to me but i would add a wall bump texture to your walls to not make the paint so flat. I don't know what else to tell you

[R.Stewart]

Yeah i usually use a marble image as a bump for the walls. I forgot with this one but I'll be sure to add it for the next render. Well thank you for reminding me about Active shade I'm very greatful for that. When I get it figured out it'll be a real time saver.

 

Cheers

 

Richard

[Justin Hunt]

Sorry for not getting back to you,

 

try these settings for FG

Multiply 1

Use interpolate 80

Diffuse bounces 2 (any more than three and its a good time to use photons)

Noise filterin Standard

Trace Depth Max 20 , refections and refractions 10

 

Image Sampling min 1 max 16

 

Exposure control, shadows 0.2 ( this will brighten the really dark areas)

 

Active shade doesn't work with mentalray (as far as I know anyway)

 

The speckles are problably down to the glossie samples on the materials being too low, very low image sampling settings and overly contrasty exposure.

 

jhv

[R.Stewart]

Hey thanks Justin the lighting is a lot better now[ATTACH=CONFIG]44571[/ATTACH]. What do you think?

[Justin Hunt]

getting there,

 

The colour balance needs to warm up a bit, to counter the green bleed from the floor.

The dinning area is still too dark, maybe add a light to the pendant, a warm colour.

 

Add some AO to the couch to get some contact shadows under the cushions.

I think your refection and refraction trace depth is loo low (the black areas in the vase, not the FG trace depth, rather the raytracing trace depth.

Increase the suns softness samples to get ride of the speckles under the table.

 

The composion isn't working for me, its too low, focuses on the coffee take too much and cuts off the most interesting part of the room, the dinning area. Maybe raise up and move to the right and look towards the dinning area, show off the shape of the room.

[R.Stewart]

Ok so I've got 2 renderings here. One before I read you last reply and one after. The first one took around 30 min and the second one took around 1hr.

 

I upped the softness samples of the sun to 30 but there are still a few speckles.

 

I did have AO on the couch already so I upped the samples to 12 and the distance to 150mm.

 

I know what you mean about adding a light but I don't think what I've done with the yellow light really works.

 

I did move the camera up a touch but I'm animating this scene with a pan to the right so I want to start here and end up a few feet over.

 

For 3 seconds of animation it's going to take 60-70 hrs to render. What is the best approach for rendering the animation. I still need to look into compositing but what is the best file to save to? My teacher said something about rendering to jpegs or avi. [ATTACH=CONFIG]44575[/ATTACH]

[ATTACH=CONFIG]44574[/ATTACH]

Thanks for all the advice you're so helpful.

[Justin Hunt]

Cant see your attatchments for some reason

 

For the animation use the "Points projected along camera path" mode "along with incrementally add fg FG points to map file"

 

Render to either jpg's or tiff, never avi as it takes too much memory and if you crash you loose all the frames.

 

jhv

[R.Stewart]

Oh yeah that's right, so if I save a map file first then it only has to calculate the FG once right? As long as there are no moving objects in the space? That would cut render time in half which is great. I forgot about that.

 

So if I render to tiffs what can I use to play the animation. At tafe we're compiling the animation with premier which we haven't touched yet so I know nothing about it. Someone told me to render to avi so I can play it on many computers but I just want to do what ever creates the best quality animation. So can I render to tif and then convert it to an avi so I can show others with standard software?

 

I posted the image here if you want to peep it http://forums.cgarchitect.com/67613-after-some-constructive-criticism.html

 

Sorry to be such a drainer : )

[Justin Hunt]

you should use premiere to stitch the stills. Rendering straight to AVI is dangerous as there is a greater chance of it failing and loosing everything that had rendered.

 

With animations you can get away with lower FG settings.

 

jhv

[R.Stewart]

Fantastic Justin. Really happy with the results : D