Desperately in need of help with interior scene - Take 2

[loafer87gt]

Still really struggling with interior lighting. It seems that I just can't get enough light into the scene, and that that the lights falloff in strength too quickly. For example, if I increase the brightness of the exterior skylight, the areas immediately near the openings are totally blown out, but the rest of the scene remains very dark. I have tried compensating for this by using a very high dark multiplier for the color mapping, but this makes the scene look very washed out, stripping it of its contrast. I am at a loss as to what I need to do to get a somewhat convincing ambient light feel to the scene. I figured I should concentrate on just the natural lighting first, and then worry about adding in the flourescent and incandescent fill lights once I get this acceptable looking.

Any advice as to where I should start? Like I have said, I have tried various lighting settings and have experimented with every concievable exposure setting all to no avail. I have read through the all the tutorials I could find on the forum here, including the Flipside one I mentioned in my past post, but the settings used in this just don't seem to be working for my scene.

Any help would be much appreciated. I have till Monday to finish up the renderings, and I am really hoping I won't have to fall back to the the more familiar scanline renderer to achieve this.

I have uploaded a newer version of the scene with some materials applied to it. Not much has changed during the past two days, because I have accomplished very little with my current trial and error approach.

Thanks in advance.

members.shaw.ca/jlvisualsftp2/interior2.max

[czoog]

Have you tried using the linear color space method outlined by throb in this thread: http://www.chaosgroup.com/forum/phpB...ic.php?t=10854

I use it for all my interiors. It takes a little bit thinking to get your head around the concepts, but it works very well. Basically all you do is: use the Vray Frame buffer, apply a reverse gamma curve, and adjust the levels and exposure to suit. You will be amazed with the results, a seemingly dark image has tons of potential. This way you can get away with less lights, with lower multipliers, and therefore less blow outs. And you don't ever have to mess with the light and dark multipliers. If you still get blowouts, switch to the color mapping mode to exponential, and dial back the light multipliers as necessary.

32 bit Color correction is your friend

hth,

Z

[loafer87gt]

Thanks for the link, but unfortunately the page seems to be down. I guess for this project I am going to have to try and convert everything back to standard materials and fudge things using the standard max renderer. It's too bad, because I see you guys doing such wonderful interior scenes with the program but I am still at a complete loss when it comes to working with the lighting with such situations. I never know whether I should be increasing my lights brightness, increasing dark multipliers, increasing materials brightness or bounce multipliers - I'm more than a little bewildered with all the functions of the renderer.

I don't supposed you happen to know of any V-ray workshops planned or in the works where newbies to the program can get some good one on one time with some of the users more familiar with the program? Something that I am finding quite frustrating is that I can read through the forums and find a particular tutorial that I think is relevant to the problems I am having, but when I go to apply what I have gathered from these tutorials I have very llittle success with my scenes.

To make matters worse, even low quality test renderers seem take 3-45 minutes on my dual Xeon to render out, so at the end of the day all I appear to have achieved is generating a number of unsuccessful test renders with very little actual work accomplished. Exterior renderings are another ball of wax all together,I seem to find these quite intuitive to work with and am very impressed with the results I am getting.

Ahh, the joys of trying to learn a new piece of software...

[TRGraphics]

Can you post a render of what you have and what you don't like about it?

Here is a quick render of your scene with no changes except light intensity, subdivisions and few light cache adjustments.

Without materials it's difficult to get good contrast in the image but with the materials I think you could get good results. There are some modeling errors that slow things down but nothing that couldn't be fixed fairly easily.

The rendertime was 12:02. Still a little noisy but what do you want for 12 minutes.

Tony

[loafer87gt]

Wow, TR, that looks lightyears ahead of what I have been able to achieve. The modelling errors are probably because I used PowerBooleans on alot of the scene geometry. I never thought of this before I posted the file.

On mine machine what I am finding is that areas like the corridor are almost black - almost like all the lights in the scene are falling off way too quickly. I have also been unable to find a suitable multiplier for the light fixtures in the scene, and am at a loss whether I should be increasing darkness multipliers or raising the actual brightness multipliers of the lights. Did you use any color mapping in the scene? What sort of light cache settings did you change, and why?

Like I said, the scene is still very rough at this point as I have been spending most of my time struggling with lighting setup. Is there any chance you could send me through your revised version of the scene with the saved your rendering presets so that I could take a look see at them?

Thank you very much for taking the time to look at the file - you have no idea how much appreciate it. My email is jason@jlvisuals.com if you wouldn't mind sending through your version of the scene so that I can take a look at it.

Once again, thank you so very much.

[TRGraphics]

No problem, hope it helps in your learning process.

[loafer87gt]

I'm sure it will - I will post a work in progress shot of how things are coming along after I work with the scene this weekend.

I look foward to seeing your file and seeing what changes and parameters you modified. Have a great weekend,

Cheers,
Jason