help me with this interior please....

[skogskalle]

hi all!

this is the first time I post anything here.... I recently got Vray advanced and Ive just started to use it. It seems great, and Ive seen lots of amazing works done with it here in these forums. however, my render looks kinda crappy so please help me out.

heres the render, a wire, and some render settings... please dont comment on the design. a) its not mine, and b) no, i dont like it either. its hard to make a ugly design look good, but I feel I could do alot better with this pic anyways....







thanks in advance!

/
Kalle

[percydaman]

what dont you like about it? I think it looks pretty good. You dont have alot of openings for natural light so it looks a bit dark. Id try some photon mapping for lightmapping to get better light exposure. Also Id like to see how it looks if your first bounce multiplier is higher. Set your HSph subdivs to about 80 or so for a final render, and your Interp samples between 20 and 40. Oh and you haven't shown your colormapping rollout. colormapping is very useful for interior renders.

[skogskalle]

thanks for your reply dude!

I guess what I dont like about it is that it looks too gloomy, dark, and plain boring.... I want it too look brighter (without burning out all materials), and generally look better and more "selling"....

colormapping you say.... well, never heard of that one before. Ive previously used VrayFREE, and started using advanced a couple of days ago... lots of new stuff everywhere...
ok, here we go. colormapping is at default settings, that is: Linear Multiply, dark mult. 1.0 , light mult. 1.0..... affect background is checked... probably doesnt matter in this pic though...

oh, and my environment light is set to 0.0.... good or bad?

never used photons... heard they were kinda slow... will using the lightmap GI in the latest beta do the trick? -pushing more light into those gloomy corners?

thanks again for your help! very much appreciated! The deadline for this project is a couple of days away, so I have lots of time to test new settings and stuff.....

Ill try to increase the first GI bounce...

regards
Kalle

[percydaman]

lightmapping in the beta works great! very fast. Use them for the secondary bounce and irradiance map for the first. Unfortunately the colormapping you just gotta experiment. good thing is that it doesn't have to rerender irrad map, so render your scene. save irrad map and lightmap or whatever you use and then start rerendering your scene and youll see the difference in the lighting. Use no AA and itll go even faster. I use to start at Linear 1.7 for the dark and .7 for the light. Good thing about the HSV Exponential is that you can turn your lights up and use it to kind of tone everything down, though its easy to wash everything out. Id start with maybe exponential 1.5 dark and 1.0 light and go from there.

[skogskalle]

heres an update...

switched to beta 1.45.70 and lightmap for second bounce... extreamly fast, but Im not totally convinced. I get a very dark left cieling (sp?) corner now... Im sure this could be avoided with better setting though... me be a newbie....

colormappsettings are: HSV exp. dark: 1.5, light:1.2

increased the strength of all vray lights... the ones at the windows now have a multiplier of 26, and the cieling lights 30. dont know why, but when I rendered the scene in the new Beta, with my old settings, everything was very dark.

This pic got some more contrast in PS, and also a little color tint....

better or worse?

any crits or comments are appreciated!

[s0real]

i think your updated render looks much brighter than your first image. it certainly stands out more...
to give it a bit more 'zing' you could always try out some photometric lights for the downlights under the wall units with a nice IES file (perhaps add an extra one in the rear corner if the design allows it...)

[Candelero]

about the Ceiling and that
Dark CORNERS......

#1 With the LIGHTMAP it looks much better....
Are all of your materials VRayMtl-s ?
Otherwise some Standard MAX Material MAY not work properly with
the GI solution.... if the ceiling has such a material that explains the
corners and the dark color....


#2 I think your multipliers are quite HIGH for lighting the scene....
Is there a DIRECT light source.... coming through the windows...
/if that is a DAY-light scene/

#3 Try SOFT-ing the SPOTs a bit.... now they SPOIL the look of lights...

GOOD LUCK !

[Syclone1]

Your second render is looking alot better but as candelero pointed out the spots under the cabinets are killing the scene, try softening the spots.

-dave

[skogskalle]

thanks guys!

new update....

candelero - you were right! The wall material was a standard max material... when I changed it to Vray everything looked better...

regarding the spotlights : I know what you mean, they where too sharp... I did them in MAX 4.2. couldnt use IEs lights in that version, so I tried to create some cool fake IEs light spots... obviously with poor results.
Made them less sharp now....
If I have the time Ill replace them with real IES lights....

[percydaman]

make those little lights brighter. Their there to provide a brighly lit workspace for cutting carrots and such.

[TRGraphics]

Your image is looking very nice now! Adjusting the lights under the counter made a big difference.

The only thing I can see now is the lack of well defined shadows on the table items. With that much light coming in there should be fairly dense shadows. But I also understand how difficult getting well defined shadows is when using lightmaps. Overall, you made very good progress from start to finish!

Tony

[skogskalle]

thanks percydaman and TRGraphics!

gotta get me some sleep now... will work some more on it in the morning.

Ill boost the lights over the workspace...

TRGraphics - do you think using irr-map for secondary bounce would improve those shadows?? I know that would take some more time, but this scene renders in only 17 minutes now, including GI calc, so I think I can push it some more....
ok - its only 640x480 and the final will probably be about 2000-2500 wide. but even so...

got a few questions for you....

1) Can I render a smaller lightmap and use if for a bigger final render? like you can with Irr-maps??

2) could you give me some pointers on how to make the wine look more like wine and less like colored water.... dont know much about Vray materials yet....

thanks again!
Im impressed with how fast you guys reply in this forum! its great!

regards
Kalle

[skogskalle]

oh, and one more thing.....

I like the renders Vray produce, but I feel the lack a little crispiness.... (dont know how else to describe it)

I use the Catmull Rom AA now, and thats the sharpest I know of....

do you guys usually add some "sharpen" filter in PS or something??

[TRGraphics]

Show us your settings for 1.45.70 like you did for the older version.

My suggestion for a crisper render would be to switch to Adaptive Antialaising for one. Setting 0,2. I find that simple two level adds noise to the image.

Also, you IR settings are very low for a 640x480 render. They need to be a minimum 0, 3 for such a small image. This will help your shadow detail alot.

The noise threshold in QMC sampler is set high. In 1.45.70 it should be around .005

If you can, show us your lightmap settings as well.

Tony

[skogskalle]

here are the settings, TRGraphics...

I know some of them are low, but I dont want to wait 2 hours for a testrender.... just dont have that kind of patience... =(

but you think the shadow detail will be better if I up the settings for the final render?? thats great!

If you would render this scene at resolution about 2500 wide, and didnt want to let it take more than lets say 3-4 hours including GI calc. - what would your settings be?
I know its a wage question, and we probably have very different computer specs, but anyways.... I need settings that look good (not absolutely great) and doesnt take a whole day/night to render. could you give me some pointers?


now I really gotta get me some sleep...