Sun+Sky+Physcam or not?

[Neilg]

Go to your render settings, vray tab, scroll down to 'camera' and tick motion blur on. Only works with standard cameras.

You can decide the shutter length in frames which is why i use it ('one' tends to look pretty good, 10 for funky effects) rather than the number of seconds divided by the inverse of one to the square root of pi.
Another case of the physical camera just complicating what was already a very simple thing.

[ene.xis]

Another case of the physical camera just complicating what was already a very simple thing.

i seriously don t get it... u re just making it sound extra complicated....wich is not imHo.

[Neilg]

Haha, youre getting very defensive. It's not very complicated at all - but it was easier and less work before.

[ene.xis]

i am not...
i just think others might read your posts and jump to conlusions.
i am just trying to point out that its not complicated whatsoever...or not to whom take his/her digital AE-AF camera and shoot some photos outside. Easy as that!
i try to point out ideias to make it simple and make u skip boring steps to achive a more powerfull output (floating point baby!)

[glorybound]

may I ask you a link to the post you mentioned above?

thanx

Here is the link: www.d-e-s-i-g-n.ru

[zeronove]

Here is the link: www.d-e-s-i-g-n.ru

little confusion here

I mean the post on evermotion where luckly we can find some info about the making of that images

[Giovanni]

I played with the vray cam and sky, and I like them. However I never use them in production.
First, they seem much slower than standard cam and directional light.
Second, I just don't need energy calcs, or accurate, scientific lighting.
Third, and this is a big one, I constantly move around my scene, isolating objects, and rendering tests. Guess what happens when you render from a max viewport? Bam, superexposed, impossible to see anything...
Fourth, if I use a vray sun I have to create a max sunlight anyways, and link the vray sun to the max sun (turned off), so I can still use the location parameters (place date and hour)

Regards

Gio

[ene.xis]

Fourth, if I use a vray sun I have to create a max sunlight anyways, and link the vray sun to the max sun (turned off), so I can still use the location parameters (place date and hour)

erm...well this is false u can use daylight system and select vraysun from a drop down list

Guess what happens when you render from a max viewport? Bam, superexposed, impossible to see anything...

just use color mapping to reduce exposure before hitting render...

[visumporec]

I use always vraycam with slightly color correction, dof+bookeh effects, vertical shift...
You can set more cameras with diferent f-number, shutter speed, mixing balance ...
Really, it's a great tool!

[Morne]

nevermind...

[MikeHampton]

How is that done?

In his images I see 3 things that set him apart. Vegetation is great, lighting is wonderful, and design with a lot of eye candy. Personally I do a lot of boxes with gables... so boring is almost imposable to create anything stunning.

I'm not meaning to take away from whoever's work this is.. they are very good design visualization renderings.

But if you wonder how this are done.. just break it down to componants:

1) Realize that he is working with pretty good designs. Sometimes you have a lemon to work with.. and sure you can jazz it up as best you can.. but in the end.. you are still trying to create an exciting rendering of a lemon. If you have a great design to start with.. your job is 1000 times easier because often I find that designers want to "blame the renderings" rather than admit something is a bad design.

2) Most of what I see in these renderings are repeated details. Like take a column or a crown molding.. or a detailed railing. All you have to do is create one.. copy and rotate a little and suddenly you have created lots of visual complexity.

3) Most of the spaces are relativly small.. so he's not having to focus on 100,000 square feet or more. The smaller the environment.. the more you can focus on minute detail.

4) Once the floors walls and ceilings are constructed.. the rest of the detail in the renderings are mostly furniture/props. Cudos to him if he modeled everything from scratch.. but, and I am making an assumption here, but one that I would bet on, is that most of what he is populating the scenes with was probably not built from scratch. Most of the "props" (furniture, china, flowers, lamps, candles, curtains, etc.) look like they may have come from a libray of evermotion models (or any number of places like turbosquid, etc.). Sure.. maybe he modeled the one of thing here or there. But from the pure volume of renderings he/she has, I doubt he modeled everything from scratch.

5) I will go out on a limb and also speculate that there probably wasn't that many changes in the design on a lot of these. I would speculate that a lot of the design was pretty much set in stone before he started on it with minor changes after his work began. Again.. if he designed it himself... kudos on some nice design work! Personally I spend at least 50% of my time on every project making continious non-stop changes to the design. That's half my time I could be spending making a better rendering/animation.. but instead I have to model a new chair (one that I can't find in a library anywhere) for the 4th time.. or I'm changing the material on a piece of furniture/fixturing for the 53rd time, etc.

6) Most of the lighting I see is comming from the sun outside of windows.. so minimal lighting to have to deal with.

7) I wouldn't doubt that he might have been given minimal criteria for what goes in the renderings as far as furntiure and such. The designers in these renderings are probably not designing those things... probably just the enviroment (architecture). So they were probably pretty loose with what types of props and such that he put into them. They are probably happy as long as it fits the decor of the architecture but not so specific that is HAS to be this chair.. and THAT couch.. with THIS fabric on it or whatever. That opens up what you have in your model library tremendously if you are not as constrained as to the designers actually designing every square inch (including the furniture).


Now I'm not cutting on his workflow at all. With budgets/timelines/etc. that we all have to deal with.. you don't reinvent the wheel or trying to make/model things that you already have or that you can buy. Why model something from scratch that will take you a day or two when you can buy it off turbosquid for $20? Just because you have the knowledge and skill that you CAN model/texture something, doesn't mean you should. And I am not trying to take away anything from his renderings.. they mostly very good. I'm only trying to point out to those of you who don't think that you can do something like that.. that if you break it down into it's componants.. it's more acheivable than you might think.

Heck.. I'm in AWE of ANY full featured 3D movie by ANY company. But when I break it down to it's compontants.. if I specialized in ONE thing.. I could be one of the 200+ people that does SOMETHING for a pixar movie. Right now, I could work for Pixar.. I would be a WIZ at modeling large enviroments.. or populating large environments with lots of visual complexity. But until I break it down into all the componants that go into making something like a pixar movie.. I'm in awe of the work and talent that goes into it and it's hard to imagine how I could ever do something like that.

[Clifton Santiago]

Yes. Sun, Sky, and Physcam + LWF always. I drop all in at default for exteriors, and get perfect renderings. The only time I ever had contrast issues, was a few hours after I switched to LWF, like 3 years ago. You simply have to use light and materials in a way that respects the linear workflow (i.e. working with correct (linear) mid-range values due to gamma correction).

[Neilg]

i am not...
i just think others might read your posts and jump to conlusions.

What conclusions would those be?
It's a thread about what we use, I use that - it makes no difference to your image quality, just changes the buttons that you have to use to get a rendering out.

To be fair I do miss the white balance and distortion from the physical camera when working with camera matched shots - if you could drop that on the standard cam as a modifier i'd be sorted.

[duke2]

I reverted to standard cam, set sun to .025 and never looked back. But at some point, I will. My problem I think is that I have absolutely no real-world camera experience, so i've never been able to appreciate some of the extra control vray physcam gives you. That, and it doesn't have orthogonal, and i've used that a hell of a lot since starting work here.

[MikeHampton]

Vray physical camera

For those of you that aren't familiar enough with a real camera to use the vray physical camera I have a suggestion.

If one isn't as familier with a real camera, I'm assuming that when you use a camera.. you always just use it in automatic mode. Most digital cameras that I see and know if will tell you what setting it is using (and often will even bake that information into the file of the photo so you can recall it later) when it takes a photo. If you make sure you have all the display info turned on (some cameras may let you turn this info off so it never shows on the display), simply look at what the camera is doing while you are taking photos. It will tell you what f-stop, shutter speed, and ISO setting it is using for each photo. Just look at this information with each photo you take.. or even just go to various environments, inside and outside, (turn the flash off) and hold the button half way down and just look at what settings the camera is using.

Although these settings are not the end all be all, after a while you will start to get the hang of what settings you might start with under certain lighting conditions. So you will at least have a starting point for the VRay physical camera at least when just considering overall exposure/illumination of the rendering. DOF and motion blur and such are a different animal all together.

Of course it's only a starting point, and one may vary greatly from it to overexpose or underexpose a rendering based upon what mood one might be going for.. but at least it's a starting point.