viewport brightness to match render Somewhat

[kalamazandy]

This has been an annoyance for a while, but I just kind of ignored it because I haven't had time.

I just did a few renders with ART render, which Kinda sucks, but was kind of awesome at the same time. I set up 3 lights on a sweep, set up the materials, and fooled Everyone at work. "Hey, when did the prototype come in?" They thought I took it out back and used the studio to render it.

Well, then we threw just a Little more at it. Aaaand the render times went Crazy, shadow problems everywhere, fireflies. Pretty much everything you'd expect from a young render.
But the viewport lighting matched the render Really closely. The overall exposure was close, shadowing was somewhat close. Just no GI bounces.

Is there any way to get the viewport to look somewhat like a vray render? I switched to Vray and it renders ok, but really dark. Adjusting exposure it looks ok, but the viewport is Way overbright.

Some naysayers will say, "just use defualt lighting, it doesn't mean anything" but those people probably don't do lighting. You can still get a good idea of your light Ratio on the object. Consider it to be modeling lights in a photo studio. Yeah, it's not at all the same brightness. It's just meant to help you know how much brighter this side is than that, and where the lights are coming from. But all I see is a hot white mess because I have to turn the change the exposure quite a bit, so now the viewport is unreasonably bright.



So yes, I know the light isn't going to "match." But if I have to change the exposure pretty bright, is there a way to make the viewport a reasonable brightness? Or is there a way to change the exposure Only in vray render, so max thinks the exposure is fine for the viewport, then vray just Adds more?

How are you guys that do lighting handling that?

[Deflaminis]

I just make one of my viewports small and use RT.

[kalamazandy]

Every time I go to use RT, something isn't supported. But that's a good idea.

I ended up finding something that worked well enough for my scene, but I haven't looked into it much.
Under exposure control is Physical Scale. It's set to 1500 candelas / RGB unit. The render didn't appear to change, but I didn't actually do a comparison. I was rushing.
making that number higher made the viewports calm down, but the render looked ok. I'm not really sure what's happening to that though. I'd have to do some research.

If anyone knows what that would be effecting, please chime in here.

[svetlozar.draganov]

What are the V-Ray and 3dsMax versions you are using?
I did some basic tests and I got very similar exposures between the viewport and the final render.

I'm not sure if Physical Scale is supported in the V-Ray version you are using but if it indeed doesn't affect the rendering it is probably not.
In 3.50.04 changing Physical Scale parameter will affect the exposure of the final rendering as well.

[Morne]

I'm one of those that use "default lighting" for viewports. No point in trying to get real lights in viewport since my scenes typically have 300+ lights. So far I havent found a way to get anything meaningful out of the viewport with more than 5 lights.

[OPEN_RANGE]

Not sure if this will help or be applicable. Using max 2015, 2016 and corresponding current vray. For exterior arch vis using vray sun/sky, linear workflow, physical camera, if I enabled use scene lights the viewport would be insanely over exposed. If I changed the vray sun multiplier from (correct/default) 1.0 to 0.01, then the viewport would have the lighting conditions/exposure that looked right.

This would randomly change back to overexposed within any given scene.

Now with new work station and new GRAPHiCS CARD. This now longer seems to happen.

you could consider sending a sample scene to chaos support and see if they have the same problem. They offered to do that for me...but since I was planning a new workstation I waited to see if that solved it, which it did.