WIP office interior.

[aflack]

This is the current image I am working on and I'm having a lot of problems that I hope you can all help with!

 

Basically the firm of architects I am working for is moving into this building next April. All the external walls, windows and roof are existing and my firm is adding in the mezzanine floor. The only bit of the design that has been agreed upon is the how the new floor and balustrade will look like the rest will change. The tables just give a representation of what will be there along with the wall underneath the new floor this will be some sort of storage wall with sliding doors some glass, some solid!

 

I am using Mental Ray because I don't have anything else! The current image is done using 1 mental ray spot light for the direct sunlight and a skylight with a blue tint! Please see the attached images below for my setting. To get a decent scattering of photons I need to use about 6 million but my machine keeps crashing and saying coming up with the error "Not able to allocate memory" (I'm using a 3.1 Pentium 4 with 1.5Gb of memory).

 

I was under the impression that if you used enough photons and let Mental Ray calculate the radii for GI and Final Gathering it came to the best solution, how-ever even using 6 million photons it didn't give good crisp shadows under the setback on the mezzanine floor edge. If anyone could suggest how I could achieve this that would be great.

 

There will be a number of artificial lights on the underside of the mezzanine floor but that just haven't had their positions agreed on yet. Has anyone come up with a good way to simulate a decent looking artificial light, I have modelled them and made them all stainless steel but they don't look very convincing. My firm also wants to see what the artificial light will look light but my experience with Mental Ray is that as soon as you add more than a couple of lights in a scene things slow to a crawl has anybody come up with a solution?

 

I realise I have a lot of questions, I've only been using Max for about 4 months and only seem to be moving forward slowly so any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

Thanks.

[kicks]