inconsistency

[alexworx]

Hi all,
This is driving me mad. I cant seem to figure out what I am doing wrong. I setup up one scene with a hdri dome, camera and a piece of geo for a background with a gray material. I am using the same setup for each of my assets. I set the first one up ( falcons ) then did a save as and merged in the Superbowl geo. Deleted the falcon stuff so I just had the Superbowl stuff. Did another save as brought in the Titans stuff. Deleted the Superbowl stuff. Now I have 3 different scenes with the same lighting,same camera. I am using auto exposure and auto white balance. Why am I getting 3 different rendering results?

Im using 3ds max 2018 with V-Ray Next

Any idea what I am doing wrong?

Thanks!

[cheerioboy]

I'd guess something either got merged accidentally or deleted accidentally. Just keep everything in one file, with each object in it's own layer that you can hide/unhide and see if that helps with consistency.

[alexworx]

I'm sure that could have been the case, but I doubled check the files and its seems pretty clean. I will keep digging.

Thanks.

[Raven]

Have not played with this in Vray Next, but if it works the same as photography auto white balance and auto exposure will always give you different results if something in the frame changes.
Auto exposure tries to average out the tones in the scene, auto white balance does the same, but with color.
Because your images have vastly different major colours, your camera compensates very differently.

[Neilg]

Turn off auto white balance. It's trying to compensate for the colors in the objects.

[cheerioboy]

ah, I new NEXT feature. fun!

[PIXELBOX_SRO]

Use the white balance from the file you like the most and turn off the awb in the remaining two scenes

[alexworx]

Thanks guys. awb off! I will try that in the morning.

[vlado]

What the other guys said - the auto white balance is reacting based on the colors in your image.

There are some ideas to research adjusting the white balance based only on the raw diffuse lighting, but we haven't gotten there yet (and I don't know how well it will work anyways).

Best regards,
Vlado

[alexworx]

Thanks for the clarification Vlado.

[dlparisi]

What the other guys said - the auto white balance is reacting based on the colors in your image.

There are some ideas to research adjusting the white balance based only on the raw diffuse lighting, but we haven't gotten there yet (and I don't know how well it will work anyways).

Best regards,
Vlado

Do you mean what's in the "VRayRawLighting" element? I wholeheartedly agree with this and was going to suggest something like this. While real world cameras have to base their auto white balance on what's seen in camera, it would be great if VRay could adjust the white balance to the lights that are lighting the scene. I've tried doing this manually by using an gray override material with Auto white balance 'on' to get the color temperature and it seems to work out ok (though not exactly "automatic" at this point). I can certainly see the need for both approaches though as you may want to base the white balance on the final image rather than just the lighting.

[Deflaminis]

I haven't played with it much but it would be nice if we could just set a region for it to sample from (or sample the render directly) to tell it which area should be white. I haven't used SolidRocks for a while but the auto white balance always worked pretty well.

[Zakkorn]

Think the same as a photographer.
When you shoot products on the same background same actually camera settings, you NEVER, EVER use auto white balance.
As simple as that.
You have to use a lighmeter to find the exact white balance and then you use that to your camera settings.
As I said never relay on your camera's auto white balance.
But even at that point you can shoot a raw image and change that later.