Interior lighting setup

[pietervanstee]

Hi there,

Can anyone advise me on how to get a decent lighting in my interior?
My settings are defenitely not too low, but still I get thes spots...

Please have a look at the attachments and rendersettings I'm using now.
I've setup a HDR dome light in combination with a vray sun for the lighting.

Thanks!

[PIXELBOX_SRO]

just transfer to BF/LC workflow and youre sorted with spots

[Vizioen]

Is this an animation?

[pietervanstee]

Vizioen No, is for stills.

PIXELBOX_SRO I'm used to work with IR&LC but I'll defenitely try that, thanks!

[PIXELBOX_SRO]

Start with defaults settings for that thats MSR 6 AA 1/24 and NT 0,01 and use vray denoiser set to 0,3 strength and 2px radius.
If youre not happy go for NT 0.005 or raise the AA

[pietervanstee]

Thanks for those details Pixelbox,

I've been experimenting with the settings here, and this is what I'm getting.
I'm quite pleased with the result. Due to my render nodes the render time is still acceptable however it takes defenetely longer than the IR method.
Also I keep getting quite some noise, which is mostly visible on the walls.
I'm not a fan of the denoiser as it messes up your image.

Also in this image I get a very bright white in the reflections of my glasses (on the table for ex), what causes this and how do I get rid of this?

So do you still have any advice on this settings?

[PIXELBOX_SRO]

downtune the burn in VFB?
I am some artifacts from adaptive domelight are you using it? Are you using NEXT?
The settgins for denoiser shoudl not be that bad try in on a final resolution (region)
For the glass i woudl recommend raising the reflective/refractive passes? Dont know it depend on the power of the light outside and the power of environment.

[Muhammed_Hamed]

Your IR subdivs and LC retrace threshold are reason for this behavior. No need to change these in my view
These are the settings that I would use personally for this kind of scene, Reset everything to default first and only change these,
sampler type, bucket
Min subdivs 1
Max subdivs 32
Min shading rate 16
noise threshold .008
Primary GI engine BF
Secondry engine LC DEFAULT VALUES, only change subdivs to 2000
Now, if you want cleaner result, you can go down on the noise threshold and don't change anything else.

Adding Sample Rate and GI render elements will help you solve this kind of issues usually
Your GI render element will show these splotches all over the place.. You are making things harder on you really ,playing with IR subdivs and LC retrace threshold. More subdivs doesn't mean better IR quality really, but it can affect details
If you want to use IR, Reset everything to default, then using the medium preset, change Max rate to 0 isntead of -1 , And color threshold to 0.3
Don't change anything else.
For LC, use default values and only change the subdivs to 2000
This should get rid of these spoltches, but personally I don't use IR in my interior renders. BF is way better in areas of contrast and shadow and it is not that slower than IR in Vray next. The difference is very tiny with the settings I mentioned above.

Also I don't like your sampling settings :/
Using max subdivs of 12 is not enough really. Many areas will be cutoff, ie the max number samples are not enough to achieve the noise threshold you aim at.
With interior scenes, I wouldn't recommend anything below 24 (which is the default value)
Using 12 will cause many areas to be cutoff in your render,so If you add a sample rate render element, you will see that almost everything is red, which is not good
No idea why you used min shading rate of 10. you can leave it at 6 for all of your scenes and use the noise threshold to control how clean your render is.
Personally I would use 16 for this specific scene which is GI intensive.. This will help with cleaning the noise, even without going down on the noise threshold.
Also, use bucket sampler for this kind of scene, it is way faster than progressive and gives cleaner results with the same noise threshold. You will need to use something like 50 or 100 for Max subdivs with progressive.

[Vizioen]

Spots in the reflection look like some artifacts of a none vraymaterial in the scene. (But could be something else, hard to tell without a scene or passes to investigate)
Light cache shouldn't be this high for a still. I leave it at the default of 700. Also turn on use for glossy rays in LC.
Wouldn't use Ambient Occlusion either (slows down render) and looks fake but that's a personal opinion of course.
Set the burn value somewhat lower for instance 0.2 or similar but set the color mapping mode to none don't apply anything and fiddle with the burn value in the VFB (this way you have all the information you can get in the image and the speedboost of reinhard not sampling in overbright areas), and you can use lens effects when necessary.
As for the noise, with these settings you shouldn't have that much noise imo, could be material related (texture sharpness, bump, unreal material settings,..) or maybe scene related (lighting/camera not physically correct)

[pietervanstee]

Hi,

Thank you for your reply, I've switched light setup and now the blown out bright spots are gone.
Artefacts could be from the adaptive dome indeed, I'm using Vray Next.
Is there a way to get rid of this while being able to use the adaptive, because otherwise I'll have to place portals in all the windows.

About the denoiser, I have some screenshots... doesn't look usable to me
The last attachement is using 0,65/7,0 which looks more clean, but loses a lot of detail which makes it look flat...

[PIXELBOX_SRO]

You shoudl send the scene to Vlado!
He said most of the bugs related to adaptive dome light come have been solved but it looks like they werent.
Depends what version of Vray NEXT you use, but i am sure if you send him the scene with the render atached, the guys will debug it for the next official update.

[pietervanstee]

Muhammed_Hamed , thank you for the comprehensive explanation.
I've used the settings you provided, but still got quite noisy results, also using the sample info shows that the max subdivs 32 (even 42) isn't enough... so I think there's another problem.
At the moment I've turned off render hidden geom, and now I'm getting better results, with clean GI and walls, so I'm trying to figure out where the noise is coming from.
At first I had en jpg texture on the walls in the diff slot only 0.15, removed this one completely to make sure that wasn't the problem.

I'll do some further testing and let you know if I can find what's causing this.
I've attached a screenshot with and without render hidden geometry, please have a look



Vizioen The material issue seems to be fixed, ao is turned off, was just a test isn't something I'm using regulary.
As you pointed out the noise could be coming from another issue, I'm looking for the source of the problem now.

PIXELBOX_SRO Will do some further testing, and if it doesn't get fixed I'll send it to vlado to debug it.

Thanks all!

[Muhammed_Hamed]

Looks clean with render hidden Geo off
So with render hidden Geo on, The sample rate above is using Max subdivs of 32?
I think this is probably a bug with adaptive dome light. No way Vray is using the max number of samples 1024 on these walls and things are still very noisy

[pietervanstee]

Hi there,

I'm still working on optimizing my model. However I've got decent interior render results, the time it takes is way too much (in my experience).
Something must be slowing down my render, because I'm used to get my render 8000*4000 panoramic in about 45min (using my render nodes).
At the moment I'm testrendering with your settings (@Muhammed_Hamed) at about 1h20 for a small size render 1200*800 (see attachment).

I'll be testing further here, if there are any suggestions, please let me know.
Thank you!

[Muhammed_Hamed]

Sample rate indicates that Vray is having hard time with one light or more in your setup.
What did you use for your lighting?
Are you overexposing your render and using lower exposure in VFB?
How many cores you have on your render nodes?
At this resolution and for way more complex scenes than this, I get render times between 20 to 30 minutes on an i7 7900X @4 GHZ (10 cores, 20 threads)
This one took 24 minutes and pay attention to how the sample rate pass looks like





This scene has over 600 textures with plenty of glossy materials, SSS and Refraction
I used the exact same settings I pointed above and I even used .01 noise threshold with no denoiser

This second render took 28 minutes.. See how sample rate looks like





This is 3.6 ,so Vray next should be even faster..
With Vray sun and sky, I believe you still need to use portals