Color mapping with walkthrough animation

[tricky]

I am shortly to be involved in the production of a walkthrough animation of a church. The route will be mainly internal, but there are large windows allowing the daylight/sunlight to stream in, and there will be a portion where the camera moves from an interior space to an external, courtyard garden. The animation will be comprised of many different cameras (i.e. not one long boring camera path!). Each exposure can therefore be controlled on a camera-by-camera basis depending upon the elements that are in shot.

I'd like some tips for setting the color mapping options of Vray to achieve a good balance of interior lighting and sunlight/daylight through the windows.

Of course, with traditional photography, exposing for an interior will result in a blown-out exterior. Likewise, exposing for the exterior will result in a dark interior. This is natural and expected: to achieve a compromise shot where the interior is suitably bright, but the exterior/sunlit areas are not overly blown-out requires composite processing.

My normal workflow in Max (for still images) is as follows:-

Max preferences are set with a display gamma of 2.2, 'Materials and Colors' are both ticked, and 'Bitmap Files' input/output gamma are set to 2.2/1.0 respectively.
Vray Color Mapping is set to Linear Multiply, the Dark/Bright multipliers are set to 1.0, Gamma is set to 1.0 and the top four options of the available five (Sub-pixel mapping, Clamp Output, Affect Background and Don't Affect Colors) are all ticked. Linear Workflow is un-ticked.

I believe I will need to tinker with these settings for a walktrhough animation. From memory, with animations of yesteryear, we used to have the type set to 'Exponential', and the Dark/Bright multipliers both set to 3.0 or 4.0.

Could anybody give guidance on a good starting point for this?
What settings do you guys typically use as a starting point for walkthrough animations?

[add101]

Are you using a VRayPhysicalCamera? you could consider animating exposure of camera (a video camera in real life would automatically adjust it's exposure. if it moves fast light would be 'blown out' for a while, as it adjusts exposure- even happens when panning a camera from dark area of a room to a lighter room).
This could maybe creat some interesting light/glow effect for a church...
If the camera goes from interior to exterior slowly the interior to exterior the animation of exposure could be quite gradual.

If you adjust camera values you shouldn't need to adjust light mapping values, but i'd be interested to hear about different workflows people are using.

I use similar settings, but have gamma set to 2.2 in V-Ray Color mapping panel to burn gamma correction into images.

[pg1]

I would do any exposure shifts in post, if you do it with the vray camera you will be constantly fighting to balance your animation in post.
Output to exr and dont burn in the gamma and you should have plenty of colour to play with.

[GatesB]

Have you tried setting the PhysicalCamera type to Video Camera which would better simulate the CCD Matrix of a video camera. You can play with the latency until you get the effect you want.

[add101]

I would do any exposure shifts in post, if you do it with the vray camera you will be constantly fighting to balance your animation in post.
Output to exr and dont burn in the gamma and you should have plenty of colour to play with.

doing it in post makes a lot of sense. i guess this is where high dynamic range will really help the flexibilty of the adjustments in post. i think it's time i started rendering to open exr rather than PNGs.