Residential Lobby WIP

[dlparisi]

What I'm wondering is, how it has affected your production workflow in terms of intial set-up, and day to day pipeline. For example, have you hardware calibrated your monitor(s), and how has it affected your textures - have you had to tweak them to suit the new approach?

The inital setup of my scenes has actually gotten a lot easier as the light behaves much more like I would expect it to. I have had my monitor hardware calibrated using the monaco puck but it's not truly necessary. Right now I'm actually using the praxisoft (http://www.praxisoft.com/pages/products.wiziwyg.html) calibrated setting and it looks basically the same as the hardware one. One advantage is that you can tell your client to load it up as well and it should match fairly well. If I reload a chair or piece of furniture from my old setups, then "Yes" I do need to adjust them to have them render the same. Usually not too big of a problem though.

One of my concerns, which has just croppedup in throb's original thread, is what happens when you have your monitor calibrated and all set up to the appropriate gamma, etc and the rendered image looks great, but when the client looks at it on their monitor, it looks terrible because their monitor has not been calibrated. Your post has eased that concern somewhat, as your images look great on my monitor which hasn't been calibrated.

Since at the end of the process you bake in the gamma adjustment it doesn't matter to the client how you worked on the image. Whatever your process though, there's no guarantee that it will look the same on their monitor. Tell them to calibrate with Praxisoft. It should however look pretty close if you print it or watch it on a good TV. Keep in mind too that Throb's and Gij's workflows are a little different-throb keeps the image in linear space all the way through the process and really only adjusts the VFB to show it correctly. Gij's version uses the Gamma Correction color mapping and sets the white mult. to .4545 which effectively bakes in the gamma after computing all of the lighting in linear space. I may be wrong about this but I think this is the gist of it and the main difference between them. Gijs?? Throb??

Another slight reservation that I have is, that beacuse I'm a freelancer, and from time to time work in-house at various visualisation companies, what would happen if I was using "Linear Workflow", but the rest of the team weren't. If we were all working on the same project and sharing common textures and materials, how would that work in terms of consistency?

I don't think it would work unless you render out your frames separately from the rest. None of the textures, colors, or reflection values would be right if you rendered in the wrong gammaspace.


BTW, I think I've narrowed down the cause of the white dots in the image. It's the old problem with the ColorCorrect plugin. It's just been a while since I had any problems with it so I started getting lax and using it again. Thankfully it's only only a couple of stills so I could photoshop them out.

[DaForce]

dlparisi:
I just finished a render which had CC on a few materials... and just noticed the white dotes...damn.. but easy to PS out.
Is there a way of not getting these other than not use CC hhehe.. or is it just a CC bug?

[dlparisi]

DaForce: I don't know for sure that the CC plugin is the problem but from the sticky in Problems (http://www.chaosgroup.com/forum/phpB...ic.php?t=11329), this looks like the cause and seems related to the CC plugin directly so there may be no way around it.

[DaForce]

Actually it turns out my problem was related to some tiny mesh i had place on the ground and then forgotten about.. and it was only apparent in a 1600x1200 render that the mesh was there... LOL ahh well.

[jacksc02]

nice images dude.

[armilla]

Thanks for answering all my questions so well David, I really appreciate your time. One final thing though, you mention that there is a difference between throb's and Gijs' methods, so which one are you using? I assume from your initial explanation that its Gijs' approach?

Cheers.

[dlparisi]

I generally use Gijs method. Since I work on primarily on stills in Photoshop there is no direct way to work with the float linear image and so I end up converting it to 16 bit and gamma 2.2 immediately anyways. I suppose I could put an adjustment level layer on top of all of the layers with a midtone value of .4545 but haven't really seen a need.

Also Gijs' method may take a little longer to render but produces slightly better sampling results it seems.