Exterior First Vray Work

[chris-x//]

Hi,

First I wanna thank every people in this forum for sharing experience and making such a living and constructive forum. This is rare and precious so thanks for that.

This is my first post in here with my first (wip but almost finished) image. Just a building in a place outside town, this is my first exterior, sorry for the big watermark but I read some days ago a guy who's work was stolen and that really really (insert bad word). Hope you will like. The grass technique used was the one from a previous excellent topic but texture was my personnal home grass but thx a lot to the one who made that turoial with the sheeps.

So here is the image, kinda different style...



I have a lot of corrections to make on that image but here's the main stuff, c&c are more than welcome.

Then I started with a simple or two interiors, one went very well, but I have several problems with photon mapping for secondary bounces, I tried to make an image as explicative as possible. I read several tutorials about ph mapping but I can't get rid of those dark corners, I played all the day long with parameters, read the manual etc but uh, can't manage to correct that, maybe my settings are totally wrong I dunno, higher settings for IR didn't solve the thing, photon is on 400, i tried higher and much lower but things aren't changing a lot. Could someone help me on that please, here's is the image


Many thanks in advance,
Keep posting great stuff all of you.
Best Regards,
Chris

nb : topic renamed just because photon prob is solved and i have to free space so i delete photon pics, thanks to the ones who helped me

[natty]

hi and welcome to the forum
Your exterior is Excellent., great attention to detail, well done

on the photon mapping question i think the reason you have the dark corners is because you havent ticked Convex Hull Area Estimate, that is designed to rid the dark corners.

you could also raise the amount of Diffuse Subdivs for your vray light and lower your sampling Subdivs, 50 is very high, cut it down to 20 depending on the size of your light.

also your HSph subdivs are very high .. around 60 normally is fine.
Clr thresh wants to be around 0.3 and the Nrm thresh also around 0.3.

your photon bounces need to be the same as the interp sample, and your max sample for you photon map is way to high, i try to stick to around 40-60, photon Multiplier is high also which probably means your light needs to be stronger ..... a them sort of levels you will get an image with to much contrast and washed out materials.

hope this is of some help

Regards

[chris-x//]

Hi natty,
thank you for your comment on the image, always nice to hear. Thanks a lot too for the advices on the photon setup, here's the updated image, things are a little better with +/- the parameters you adviced to me, I'm gonna continue tweaking but this scene is giving me a hard time... Hope i'll get rid of that problem soon.

Regards,
Chris

[trixian]

Pardon my ignorance, but why use photon maping if you are trying to eliminate any evidence of it by removing its natural boundary (read shadows)?
If you kill all the gi shadow effect, you might as well just use fill lights and fake the colour bounce the old way with carefully placed max light.
Those "dark" corners you have there are supposed to be there imho, and removing them any more than you already have will result in a less convincing lighting solution, unless that is the purpose.
Am I missing something here?

[natty]

yeah trixian is right ... you dont want to get rid of all corner shadows ... your image will look flat

[chris-x//]

You're absolutely right, I don't wanna kill all gi shadows fx but in my first post, the corners were a little too dark imo, now they're pretty ok so i'm kinda satisfied. Thanks both of you for the help and opinions.

I'll continue that little experiment scene and post some renders later on.
Now place to my exterior

Best regards,
Chris