LWF and high light multipliers

[armilla]

So I've finally got round to implementing Linear Workflow, and have used it on a couple of shopping mall jobs now. I'm really impressed with the way it gets light into areas that were previously very dark and required lots of additional fill lighting. However, I'm finding that when I do add additional lights such as max spots or omnis to areas that still need boosting, the multipliers of these lights need to be much higher than before adopting LWF - in some cases as much as 10x. Just wondering if anyone else has noticed this, or whether it's something I'm doing wrong. I'm using vray sun/sky, vray camera and reinhard colour mapping with 0.6 burn to take the hotspots down. Could any of these be a factor rather than LWF?

Using the reinhard burn value definitely knocks the stuffing out of vraylightmtls, and even with a multiplier of 50 I'm not getting a decent result. I've tried using vraylight mtl with shellac and blend materials as described on the forum, but haven't had much success with that either.

It's not causing any major problems, it's just that I find myself using much higher multipliers than previously, which I guess will ultimately impact on render times.

Apologies for the ramble! Any suggests will be greatly appreciated.

Cheers,

Andrew.

[Clifton Santiago]

LWF is not the problem in this case. If you want the multiplier of your lights to remain similar to previously, use a regular max camera. In that case your lights will actually need to be reduced in most cases from non-LWF scenes.

Having to increase the multiplier of your lights is because you are using VrayPhysicalCam. Think about it like this: You set the sun multiplier to 1.0 and adjust the camera settings until the brightness looks correct. If you put a regular Max camera in the same scene it will render way too bright. You will probably have to adjust the multipler of the sun to about .01. This means your Vray camera settingsa are about 1/100th the exposure of the max camera, so it only makes sense you might need to increase other lights in the scene by as much as a factor of 100. The same goes for Vraylightmtl.

[armilla]

Hi Aaron,
Thanks very much, that's a great explantion. Makes perfect sense now I think about it. I was just concerned that I was doing something wrong with the whole LWF thing.

Thanks again.

Andrew.

[Clifton Santiago]

No problem. Also keep in mind the same goes for environment lighting...