interior render example to share

[GarbageDweller]

Ah, you do great work; ill have to take a closer look at the rest of your work when I am home.

Question related to this kind of rendering; is it possible in Vray for Blender to create a clean texture atlas and bake an entire scene's texture into it from Vray? That way you could take an interior scene like this with Vray quality appearance and play with it in a game engine like Unity?

[leandro_cs]

Question related to this kind of rendering; is it possible in Vray for Blender to create a clean texture atlas and bake an entire scene's texture into it from Vray? That way you could take an interior scene like this with Vray quality appearance and play with it in a game engine like Unity?

I think it's possible. Someone already tested it with Blender Game Engine (the process to bake the textures would be the same):
http://forums.chaosgroup.com/showthr...er-Game-Engine
http://blenderartists.org/forum/show...BGE-looks-nice

[glorybound]

I thought the scene was in MAX. Any way to get it into MAX?

Hi All, I've been trying to figure out how to set up lighting to get clean, quick renders in the current vray (3.4) I think I finally have a scene that's working the way I want it to (my tip - ditch the dome light and add area light portals or softboxes.) I am happy to share this scene file so anyone can poke around/ comment/ ask questions. Enjoy!
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/...2-packed.blend

Andy

[JuhaW]

I thought the scene was in MAX. Any way to get it into MAX?

Geometry with cameras/lamps is easy, export .fbx or .dae.
Materials are trickier even when you have "scene_materials.vrscene"-file.
If you are lucky to import "scene_materials.vrscene"-file to Max, I doubt they are the same names than already imported material names (with .fbx/.dae) and you'll have to assing all materials.
Thats what I thought, might be easier way I dont know.

[andybot_cg]

I thought the scene was in MAX. Any way to get it into MAX?

If you're willing, you could download and install the Blender build with the Vray add-ons and poke around in the scene. I believe the downloads are accessible to everyone (logged in at the chaosgroup downloads or nightlies)

[glorybound]

I think I'll do that, thanks!

[GarbageDweller]

Hey Andy! So I looked at your portfolio site; you do really great work! One thing I was curious about (if you dont mind me asking) is how much of the work you do is done in post? Do you rely heavily on photoshop or do you manage to get those renders looking that good right out of the gate? Sometimes I wonder if I'm wasting my time trying to get my renders right and if I should just do it in post.

[andybot_cg]

Hey Andy! So I looked at your portfolio site; you do really great work! One thing I was curious about (if you dont mind me asking) is how much of the work you do is done in post? Do you rely heavily on photoshop or do you manage to get those renders looking that good right out of the gate? Sometimes I wonder if I'm wasting my time trying to get my renders right and if I should just do it in post.

Thanks, appreciate it!

I don't do very much in post, most of what you see is the straight render. The most consistent "trick" I use, mainly on interiors, is to use 0.1 or less intensity for the sun. This allows me to more easily balance daylight with real world artificial light settings and interior camera settings.

Most of the time, all I do in post is add a background sky and maybe a subtle curves adjustment to lighten everything. Sometimes I'll mask some materials and do some HSV adjustments. I've been playing with LUT's more recently, and using these, I find I don't even need to do the curves adjustments.

The main thing I've done is get a reasonable handle on the settings that work best, and have that saved in an empty file to use as a starting point for each new project. That way I just re-use my lighting components and my scene setup so I can get a new render out without too much hassle over settings.

-Andy

[GarbageDweller]

Ah, good idea in regards to settings!! I need to definitely nail down some settings that work for me and keep that handy.

Hah so i have another totally scattershot question for you (or anyone really). Earlier you mentioned the render setup you are using; how hard was that to setup in V-ray for Blender? Does it give you any headaches trying to get a renderfarm to work with Vray for Blender?

I am considering investing in 1 or 2 servers myself but I wonder now if it is worth investing in a CPU renderfarm considering the big push right now is GPUs..im afraid ill buy a CPU-based renderfarm and then a year later vray is ALL done on GPU in which case I'd want 1 or 2 of those GPU towers.......thoughts on that subject?

And thank you again for your time!

[andybot_cg]

Hah so i have another totally scattershot question for you (or anyone really). Earlier you mentioned the render setup you are using; how hard was that to setup in V-ray for Blender? Does it give you any headaches trying to get a renderfarm to work with Vray for Blender?

Quite easy to set up distributed rendering, not too many steps. Been working flawlessly for me.
https://docs.chaosgroup.com/display/...butedRendering

As far as sending to an outside render farm, I did that 3 years ago on a project, and it took a little bit of fiddling but it worked out. It's probably easier now, and I've got a project coming up that I will need to use a render farm again, I'll let you know how it goes.

I am considering investing in 1 or 2 servers myself but I wonder now if it is worth investing in a CPU renderfarm considering the big push right now is GPUs..im afraid ill buy a CPU-based renderfarm and then a year later vray is ALL done on GPU in which case I'd want 1 or 2 of those GPU towers.......thoughts on that subject?

And thank you again for your time!

I'm planning to get a new workstation with some serious graphic card this fall. It does seem that's the direction things are heading. Not sure of the answer to what's the best investment currently.

[GarbageDweller]

Cool! Good to know that distributed rendering from blender seems to be pretty ironed out.

What kind of GPU based workstation are you looking into getting? And by any chance do you know of any good "out of the box" GPU servers? I remember several years ago Refractive software was selling towers literally full of GPUs but then that solution got scrapped pretty quickly. I think it'd be cool to have a similar rendering solution that's...still supported.

[andybot_cg]

Wohoo! I just received the parts for a rebuild of my current workstation. I got an i7-6850K cpu (6-core at 3.6 Ghz, I'll probably do some mild overclocking) and a GTX 1070 GPU.

I've plugged in the 1070 in my existing workstation and did a few quick tests. Seems there are still quite a few Vray for Blender nodes that are not supported. Triplanar mapping for one! I just rendered up a few test models, and unfortunately it seems there is still a ways to go for everything to be supported that's in the production render. The big question of course is how far down the road? (And of course RT feedback isn't even implemented yet!) I'm still looking at the possibility of getting another Boxx Renderpro 2 (may be worth it to have my own little farm if I can get 720p frames down to about a minute or so. Right now it's about 3 minutes a frame on my current setup.) I need to think a bit on the ROI before I pull the trigger on that.

Boxx does have some GPU solutions, but it seems way more expensive than what you can pay for regular consumer products, same for their workstations. It's the dual Xeon servers that I think are reasonably competitive.

[andybot_cg]

Hi All, I've been trying to figure out how to set up lighting to get clean, quick renders in the current vray (3.4) I think I finally have a scene that's working the way I want it to (my tip - ditch the dome light and add area light portals or softboxes.)

Now that I've had a chance to test vray 3.5 a bit, I've found there are some significant changes to the setup of an interior scene from what I'd put together earlier. The takeaway: It's back to domelights, and scrap the portal lights. Dome with HDRI is now rendering cleaner and faster than any other light source, and light portals seem to slow things down and add noise now.

Here is a refresh of the original scene I uploaded with adjustments to the environment lighting setup and a few other tweaks:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/...3-packed.blend
(You can add in your own HDRI file instead of the sky node in the domelight setup. Which if you do, then you'll want to disable the Sun light source)

Andy

[andybot_cg]

light portals seem to slow things down and add noise now.

I've had some time to play with this more and figured out that the "simple portal" only works when there is an environment map in the background slot. It does not seem to add the light from a dome light only. Here is the render with the sky node added to the background. I am curious if this is a bug or it's expected behavior.

[kamel]

great scene i have the previous on but the last link is broken https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/...3-packed.blend