WIP - interior/exterior - to be frequently updated - insight appreciated please :)

[PIXELBOX_SRO]

Hey guys,

so i finally decided to post some of my WIP from a quite thorough project i am working on at the moment.

I am facing a lot of challenges in colouring/exposure and sampling.

First of all the interior has to feature lots of very black materials, some parts of the interior will be poorly lit (on purpose), secondly and quite obviously, the rest of the interior has to be nicely exposed

Here is a WIP of get together room for gentlemen:



and sampling



I have two issues with this image:
1.
The sampling had to be set to quite crazy levels. I have the main AA scizzors set to 1/100 and color threshold to 0.005 (MSR at default 6)
...this woudl be quite normal universal setup but i also had to set the SUBDIVS MULTIPLIER on the wooden cladding and the table to 50! As you can tell from the sampling element, thhose areas are nicely sampled, however, the rest of image would use a little bit more.....how do i do that if i already have the scizzors se to 1/100???? Raising the lowr value has small effect and setting up MSR higher kind of fixes it but is not doing great job on the edges of the cladding.
2.
I am really fighting with the dark materials/white materials correct exposure and display of colors.
Please note that the TABLE and the CLADDING is identical materiál. Yet the table comes out very light.
In diffuse, this materiál is almost black like (0,0,1) and i have to use some reflective properties to make the materiál define shape of the objects but i am really surprised how this almost black materiál behaves on the direct sunlight - i woudl need the table to look black
Furthermore, i am not so pleasantly surprised by the way the nromal map behaves on the top of the table - there is almost no bump whatsoever :-/

So i am thinking - perhaps making the materiál less reflective and increasing the light exposure would work better? I ve tried it to certain extend but the result is quite similar....the black doesnt behave like black when lit with sunlight.

Below is another view from a different location of the house shot at exactly same lighting conditions, only the light was rotated a bit.



I have yet quite lot of rooms to capture but i would love to get this stuff cracked before i go any further. Achieving nice balance between black materials and otherwise light interior parts while lettgin the black really keep its dark properties but still be able to define shape of objects.

It may result in having to use some gobos but i was thinking i will ask here forst as i am sure many of you have tackled similar situations
I woudl also love to omit the need for gobos if possible )

Thank you very much for you insight on the problems i am facing and for valuable comments !

Cheers
M

[PIXELBOX_SRO]

no idea why the images get so resized when i sent them at 3K ???

[PIXELBOX_SRO]

here is how the exterior as exposed at the moment, i have interiors exposed 2EVs higher

[PIXELBOX_SRO]

no one?

[prateekvishwa]

Exterior looks great. nice welding details etc. In second last image. why horizon is black behind the building?

[PIXELBOX_SRO]

hi Prateek,
its unfinished, all these are WIPs Hence blacknesses here and there....but i think what youre refering to is a part of a green fence thats not directly lit

[joconnell]

I'd say that's quite a tough one - how do you shoot something that's black and retain it's detail? I'd be inclined to set the material brightness a bit higher - a lot of the blacks I've sampled with a colorimeter are more around 15 on the 0-255 scale. I's definitely going to be your colour threshold making the biggest difference to your sampling too.

I take it that these are the raw renders of your scene? One thing of note which came up in the "fstorm looks really photographic" thread is that vray's renders are linear, fstorm isn't and puts a camera curve on. Real life cameras also do this and there's a bit of an s curve commonly called the "toe" (blacks) and "shoulder" (whites) so if you shot a table that's rgb 15,15,15 in real life, the camera's curve would end up pushing that value down to something much darker. I'd be inclined to do your render with realistic values on your materials and to get the photo look afterwards, put on the usual S-Curve to mimic what a camera would do. Any reference photo you're looking at is doing this so don't drive yourself mad trying to replicate a non linear photo in your raw render

[PIXELBOX_SRO]

Thanks for the input John!
I have to agree with you that i am trying to achieve the most of the looks in the raw render already.
I kind of wanted to raise the bar to learn new things as i go, but perhaps the BLACKS challenge is way too dificult
I have found out though that the most of the sample noise came from the woods normal map filtering which was set to 0.25...when i raised it to 0.6 i could return the the object subdivs multiplier back to 1
Live and learn ))

[joconnell]

Good bit of research, I've got some old looking wood in a few shows soon, I'll keep that on the list of things to check

[PIXELBOX_SRO]

here a few new WIPs from the project..still a loooong way to go and the file already has 1.5GB.
Will have to start proxying stuff out or xref

[Crayox13]

Love those exteriors Martin! I'm working on a hotel on the Adriatic coast (Istria peninsula). Do you know where I can buy those pine trees common to Mediterranean? Similar to what you used...maybe even those.

[PIXELBOX_SRO]

they are defo from evermotion - youre lucky they have SALE now )) I had to tweak them a little but but you should be happy with them straight as they are.
I plan to displace them a little if i get a chance

[3DMK]

Here's my 20 cents worth

Black is ALWAYS hard to deal with, especially when it comes to sampling & GI.
You can use a material override for the GI [with a brighter material] to get a little bit more light bouncing around.
I tend to give a little bit more reflection to blacks so that they are a touch brighter.

You can also achieve things a lot easier in post-production when it comes to 'blacks' so don't try & get it perfect in the render. It's better to have it slightly brighter than you want as the sampling in Vray will be better/faster, then adjust the blacks in post

Hope this helps
Jamie

[Crayox13]

What's defo?
Will see if they have anything new, my last evermotion vegetation was like 124 pack or something. I so often need these Mediterranean trees but they are hard to find - in full scale - not small ones.
thx

[Pixelcon]

What's defo?

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Defo