MR: interior or exterior

[nisus]

Hi all,

 

When making an interior rendering with a view on the exterior (terraces, environment,...) do you use interior or exterior for the exposure control?

 

Basicly I got a dark interior when finetuning a good exterior, or an burned out exterior when making a good interior...

 

What strategy do you use? Any more tips?

 

rgds

 

nisus

[kicks]

[William Alexander]

Approach-

 

It's like taking pictures with a camera, can't use the same settings inside and out with out compromise.

The exposure control has become a means of last resort , for me anyway. It really kills quite a bit of depth if not used just for fine adjustments.

 

Although it can be cheated.....to some degree anyway

 

Get the blown out area's materials to a lower reflectance level, leaning toward higher saturation.

 

Using standard materials (when needed) & oren-nayer-blinn shader, the roughness adjustment really gives some good control over diffuse levels allowing the darkening of over bright materials. Seems to keep the saturation up vs. washing it out with the actual Diffuse Slot adjustment.

 

On the same thinking locking the ambient-diffuse-specular colors and lowering the specular level will help the blow outs also.

 

Then there's always compositing:rolleyes:

 

 

Cheers

WDA

[nisus]

well, honestly... I've been explaining this to my collegue for over two years now, but he won't listen... I understand why, he wants a result where both inside and outside are balanced... It's clear that this is a good goal... Unfortunately there are some issues between dream and reality...

 

rgds

 

nisus

[joske]

just tell him to try it with a real photo camera in a real room/terras with lots of sun outside... if he can do that ... pls let him explain how he managed to do that... :b

[nisus]

I did...

anyway... I do understand his point... it WOULD be great!

 

nisus

[pseudoe]

Hi all,

 

When making an interior rendering with a view on the exterior (terraces, environment,...) do you use interior or exterior for the exposure control?

 

Basicly I got a dark interior when finetuning a good exterior, or an burned out exterior when making a good interior...

 

What strategy do you use? Any more tips?

 

rgds

 

nisus

 

Hello,

 

I'm new to the forum and saw your question- I've spent a bit of time looking into ways to get more of a 'human eye' exposure, and the closest I've seen so far is made with this product:

 

http://www.hdrsoft.com/index.html

 

It's a process called tone mapping that that takes a series of exposures and averages them using various fascinating math stuffs.

 

e.

[bwilson]

why not trying to render the interior and exterior seperatly, the composite the shots in After Effects. That way you can control both elements independently.

[nisus]

Hi bwilson,

 

That's what we do for now, but it would be great to render only one pass...

 

rgds

 

nisus

[nisus]

So anyone more thoughts on this in the main time?

 

nisus

[William Alexander]

Nisus,

 

.... lines of thought both involve post work. Biggest problem is clipping to whites and blacks of the render in post.

 

Quick and dirty- render so there is no 'clipping' of color values to white in the exterior portions. Which will give you darker colors inside....no clipping to black inside either, LOL. Then make a mask or render an alpha channel to mask the interior and exterior areas. Use that mask to apply a levels adjustment seperately and adjust so the light levels are more proportionate... histogram (for each seperate masked area) is evenly distributed. May create banding in the dark areas if the Values (HSV) are too closely packed toward the 'dark side' of the value spectrum.

 

The other line of thought involves rendering to passes..diffuse, shadow, direct light, and GI, maybe specular....

 

*The diffuse pass (just the raw materials)-the colors will not be dimmed or brightened for both interior and exterior

*Shadow-you get an alpha mask that can be further masked for interior/ exterior and different shadow intensities- colors applied to simulate ambient light temps effecting the shadow coloring

*Direct light-you can appply this differently using the interior/exterior mask to this pass and even accent the lighting for color temp

*GI-this pass can be applied differently again interior exterior to get the levels you need

*specular-give you the ability to 'accent' exterior brightness without exterior levels of lighting, of coursing using the interior exterior alpha mask or selection mask.

 

Coming out of mental ray shadow, direct & GI lighting work best in a multiply layer. But you have absolute control over the interior and exterior through masking them individually

 

OK maybe way complex...but it allows you, one pass render (into passes) with the level of control you maybe looking for

 

 

WDA

[ImageCube]

I will say reder multi-passes is an eary and realiable way. Or using different lights for interior and exterior also works if you really want to render in one pass.

[joske]

i did one render in Mray recently were the exter and int was no problem in same light setup. but i didn't use log exp control !

so that could explain why it workes in my scenes...

 

so drop the Log exp control i would say, it messes up with all your materials also, so i do not see any good use for it.

 

edit :

added the scene I was talking about, done in Mray and lightning result straight out of Mray so no photopaint edits on the light result.

outside the room is a square inside the buildings walls, but has no roof, so it can be qualified as 'exterior' imo

there even is a center hallway that is half interior/exterior if you like (scnd shot taking from there)

 

do keep in mind that this light setup would be nearly impossible to photograph in reality : outside would be almost white and overbright. or if not, than interior would be way to dark.

so if you're going for photorealism, this would not do the trick !

in most cases the extrerior would also be more blurred due to to the depth of field of the SLR camera.

[noi-pi]

Hi all,

 

When making an interior rendering with a view on the exterior (terraces, environment,...) do you use interior or exterior for the exposure control?

 

Basicly I got a dark interior when finetuning a good exterior, or an burned out exterior when making a good interior...

 

What strategy do you use? Any more tips?

 

rgds

 

nisus

 

 

Basically as I see it there are only 2 variables that are present. One is the

Exterior emphasis wherein our camera was placed on exterior. Second,

Interior emphasis wherein camera was placed on the interior. Almost

always our approach in lighting exterior scene is different than lighting

interior. Sometime we handsomely lighted the Interior but when viewed

from the exterior its overly burnt. And vice versa.

 

Nightshot scenes are very common to emphasize interior viewed from

exterior.

 

To go between those 2 variables wouldn't be an easy task. I'm not

saying it's inacheivable to balance those 2 lighting stategies into one -

sans compositing - and in only one pass. Its just a matter of tweaking

lights' intensities.

 

 

Exposure Control is the only last resort to brighten/darken the scene.

Talk about flexibility in MAX. But never use it though.

 

But then again, perhaps, its a case to case basis. That is, different scenes

requires different lighting strategy.

 

These are just my personal views.