Problem rendering wood texture

[Mbamkaikato]

I've been trying to render wood beams, and keep getting the same problem no matter what wooden texture i use that has grain and strokes going through it. the close up render looks great, but the same texture from a distance produces dark shadows and splotches

has anybody else had this problem? is there a way around it?

[ATTACH=CONFIG]46060[/ATTACH]

[datacrasher]

try adding a UVW map and changing the tiling to 4.0 in the U and in the V change the mapping to box under aligment choose fit. If you exclude your beams from casting shadows then max will not shine the shadows on them so if you don't exculde them max will automatically cast them over everything.

Edited December 17, 2011 by datacrasher

[Ismael]

Are the faraway beams the same geometry and you joined two different renders into one image, the close up and the far away or are they two separate sets of beams with the same lighting illuminating both?

[Mbamkaikato]

two separate sets of the same beams (cloned and instanced) in the same render, one set further away in the same lighting!

[Mbamkaikato]

datacrasher, tried changing the uv - i'll admit it made the texture look better but the problem still remains. How do i exclude only the shadows on an object without affecting the light it receives so it can still show up in the render?

[Ismael]

For what you are doing, clone and instance the lighting so it is at the same distance from the second set of beams.

Ever heard of light attenuation?

 

"The intensity of light observed from a source of constant intrinsic luminosity falls off as the square of the distance from the object. This is known as the inverse square law for light intensity.

Thus, if I double the distance to a light source the observed intensity is decreased to (1/2)2 = 1/4 of its original value."

[Mbamkaikato]

i only have the GI lighting the beams at the moment

[Peter M. Gruhn]

I've heard of light attenuation but it doesn't account for the texture difference.

 

GI is a light transport mechanism, not a light.

 

Be that as it may... Hrmm.... I grabbed one of the woods out of the autodesk library when you first posted and tried to duplicate the problem. No dice. I think of an idea then think it through a bit more and it dies. Diagnositcly, you might do a "blow up" render on the distant one to see how it looks; the problem blown up might make it more obvious where the difficulty is, if the problem goes away, that's some kind of helpful. Try switching out the bitmap, only the file, for something diagnostic, maybe light and dark gray checkers.

 

Would you agree that it looks like the texture is "the same" only "exagerated"?

 

It looks to me like too much bump or displacement. If the forground has wider more direct light and the background is receiving that light more obliquely, that could dilute/accentuate any bump. The suggestion to duplicate the light with the geometry is a good one. Set the lights to only include their local version of the geometry.

 

None of this will solve your problem, but maybe it gets us closer.