appartment vray1.46.05 testscene - free download

[flipside]

Hi,

I am testing all kinds of much used interior stuff in this scene I created some time ago. Here's a pic of the real thing:




Here's one of my test renders (chopped up to make it smaller) with some comments which lead me to paradox situations and I'm stuck.



Here's the scene

http://www.vrayrender.com/stuff/flip...y_tutstart.rar

displacement map: http://users.pandora.be/stor1/vray/mat_kilan.jpg

It's a bit set up, but optimized for nothing special. Materials are applied to every object (mainly just colors)

Here's what I am testing (see render above also):

1. GI quality vs speed: IR map only
When using good min/max rates and high hsph subdivs, the result is very slow and I need to go really high to get smooth results at ceiling above curtains. GI calculations get extremely slow on displacement of course, and also in the curtain (gi refraction caustics are on to light up the folded curtain in between the folds too).

When using low min/max and low subdivs, walls are smooth, but GI in/on curtain and other more detailed areas looks terrible.

2. Good shadows casted by wooden planks against wall.
I put the vraylight in the window to get light inside the room, but also to have nice shadows here. I don't check store with IR map because otherwise I need to set IR map quality very high (= slow, see above) to get these nice shadows.

3. Nice glossies
Even with better settings for QMC and material subdivs, I can't get the quality of 1.09 glossies with the same speed.

4. Good AA
Look at the AA underneath the window (frame etc)
It was even worse in the actual rendering (it's scaled down a bit now so interpaolation made it a bit better). Altough these kind of high contrast lines have always been a problem for me, I'm having more troubles in 1.46.05 to get rid of them. Random checked makes a difference, but it's not nicer imo. Here I used adaptive 0/2, treshold 0.1

Here's some details of a test render with low GI settings:


The sofa floats, the wooden thing has light behind it, curtain look sreally messy. (also example of AA at 100% size)



So, I invite everyone using 1.46.05 to download and render this scene and make a good looking render out of it with a reasonable amount of rendertime. (if you do so, please post time and system specs)

What I would really really really appreciate, is that vlado or tischo takes this scene and optimizes it to have a good quality/speed ratio (with the aspects described above)(vlado suggested this already a few times, so here it goes ). Since there is displacement, GI, flat vs detailes areas, transparant objects, glossies etc in this scene, I believe this is a good example for all vray users to understand the new vray build's parameters. If we have one scene optimized, we can start experimenting further from that point. Also since most of us are doing arch viz, I think this will help 90% of the forum people a big step forward.

Oh yeah, you can use every object in the scene in your own scenes of course.

I hope some people read this post till the end

Kind regards,

wouter

[travistlo]

Great Idea.

[pengo]

Simple but great Idea Flipside!

this is a useful thread for the programmers to understand what the architectural users desire in this great rendering engine!!

Maybe this topic should be in the wishlist section of this forum

bye and thanks

Maybe a little problem to solve is the bad gi (even with high parameters) with interiors with blind wich has horizontal elements the metallic type (even the architectural exteriors view of buildings with shutter at windows)

the blinds I was refering to is this kind:
http://www.centrokappa.it/zanzariere...neziane_4.html

excuse my bad english

[vlado]

Thanks for the scene; I'll play with it to see what comes up.
Best regards,
Vlado

[flipside]

Thanks a lot Vlado, I'm looking forward to it!

(ps if someone reposts the scene, is it possible to make it max5 readable?)

[flipside]

Simple but great Idea Flipside!

this is a useful thread for the programmers to understand what the architectural users desire in this great rendering engine!!

Maybe this topic should be in the wishlist section of this forum

bye and thanks

Maybe a little problem to solve is the bad gi (even with high parameters) with interiors with blind wich has horizontal elements the metallic type (even the architectural exteriors view of buildings with shutter at windows)

the blinds I was refering to is this kind:
http://www.centrokappa.it/zanzariere...neziane_4.html

excuse my bad english

There's a similar problem in this scene with the curtains. They are transparant and have an opening on top wich lets bounced light come through. See it as 1 row of your blinds

[TishoChaos]

I have just downloaded it - we will make some tests and post the results.

[vlado]

What is the resolution for the original image?

Best regards,
Vlado

[flipside]

I did a 1600*1300.

But you can change if you want, to make it faster for testing. It's just to have a starting point, if you do a 800*650, we can adapt that to higher resolutions with the min/max settings etc.

wouter

[vlado]

Here is what I have so far:

Test 1: test of direct light; light grey material on everything:


Test 2: test of direct light with materials:


Test 3: test of GI (irradiance map + lightmap) with light grey material:


Test 4: test of GI (irradiance map + lightmap) with materials; the scene turned out too dark, so I will need to adjust the materials later on. There is enough light already as seen in the previous test, so no need to push light multipliers higher.


Test 5: higher resolution and better QMC settings (click link for full res):
http://www.vrayrender.com/stuff/flipside/test5.png


Test 6: same as 5 but with higher irradiance map settings; also I moved the floor a little higher, which is why the carpet may look weird at the ends.
http://www.vrayrender.com/stuff/flipside/test6.png


Last image, gamma-corrected in post:
http://www.vrayrender.com/stuff/flip...6_hi_gamma.png


I'll leave it tonight at 1600x1300 to see what comes up, and I'll tweak the materials tomorrow to see if it makes any significant difference. Also I need to tweak the curtain material, right now it's simple glossy blue.

Also, the walls are one-sided, which leads to some artifacts (light leaks around some corners), so I will need to modify that too.

Best regards,
Vlado

[flipside]

Very nice!

Some questions:
1 - if you say there's enough light with white mats, why don't you up the multipliers when mats are applied? It's normal that dark mats bounce off less light than light ones, so why adjust all materials instead of just increasing some light multipliers?

2 - I made the walls with thickness, did you alter that then for some reason?

3 - Did you raise the floor to have more overlapping geometry?

4 - Did you use color mapping? That's another problem I'm having, when using (hsv) exponential: I can't get the sunny parts bright enough (only in post I can), even with really high multipliers

5 - For sky, sun and vraylight multipliers, how do you set their values inititally (ratio). I usually set the sunlight to at least double of the skylight, and I set vraylight to the same number as skylight (since this represents entering skylight). But from the moment I use exponential color mapping, I get lost in these light settings because the effect gets lost because of the clamping. What is the initial reason for the color mapping and what is the difference between dark and light settings of it (and why is it seperated if the values should be equal?)

6 - In the help file there's something about light maps not working well with white materials. Is this still the case in the recent builds? In general, is lightmap capable of doing highly detailed GI shadows, or is it not a good idea to use it if really high quality in detailed areas is needed? I ask because in my few tests with it, from the moment I turn up some values to get better quality, it's getting really slow also.

Thanks for all the help so far!

wouter

[kippu]

wow looks good ... gamma correction ...hmm never did that before ..thanks

[vlado]

Very nice!

Some questions:
1 - if you say there's enough light with white mats, why don't you up the multipliers when mats are applied? It's normal that dark mats bounce off less light than light ones, so why adjust all materials instead of just increasing some light multipliers?

Because if you increase the brightness of the lights, the directly lit areas (like the patch of sunlight) become so bright that they make the irradiance map extremely slow (it makes more and more samples to get a stable result). On the other hand, brighter materials ensure that you get an overall bright image, which makes the job of the irradiance map a lot easier.

2 - I made the walls with thickness, did you alter that then for some reason?

You are right, of course, my viewport was set to Box mode so I got confused. I was getting some light leaks, but I guess this is because my lightmap was too rough and some samples from the outside got mixed with those inside.

3 - Did you raise the floor to have more overlapping geometry?

Yep. It's always a good idea not to have perfectly touching surfaces.

4 - Did you use color mapping? That's another problem I'm having, when using (hsv) exponential: I can't get the sunny parts bright enough (only in post I can), even with really high multipliers

No, I did not use any color mapping. HSV and exponential mappings will never produce burnt areas in the image, that's how they were coded.

5 - For sky, sun and vraylight multipliers, how do you set their values inititally (ratio). I usually set the sunlight to at least double of the skylight, and I set vraylight to the same number as skylight (since this represents entering skylight). But from the moment I use exponential color mapping, I get lost in these light settings because the effect gets lost because of the clamping. What is the initial reason for the color mapping and what is the difference between dark and light settings of it (and why is it seperated if the values should be equal?)

Well, in this particular case the sun had a multiplier of 8.0, and the area light at the window - 5.0. The environment was the same as the area light. I also turned ON the "Ignore light normals" option for the light, since this is more physically accurate.

The purpose of the color mapping is to avoid burnt areas in the image, and optionally, to modify the brightness a little bit (but not too much), without changing all the lights. The bright and dark values should be equal if you want to get the same result as in previous VRay versions, otherwise you can change them in any way you want.

6 - In the help file there's something about light maps not working well with white materials. Is this still the case in the recent builds? In general, is lightmap capable of doing highly detailed GI shadows, or is it not a good idea to use it if really high quality in detailed areas is needed? I ask because in my few tests with it, from the moment I turn up some values to get better quality, it's getting really slow also.

Well, the lightmap works now, but it's still not a good idea to have perfectly white materials, especially for large portions of the scene. The light map can't do detailed GI shadows; it's useful only for a rough approximation of the lighting in the scene that can be used to speed up the irradiance map, for example. As for the speed, it depends on which parameters you changed

Best regards,
Vlado

[flipside]

Hi Vlado,

I'm testing a bit with the light map (I'm reproducing your series of images here)

Indeed it works better than I thought... I always thought that first and second bounces were computed seperately. But actually while computing for example first bounce IR map, it uses the info of the already calculated second bounces lightmap? If you set second bounces to qmc, will this slow down both the IR pass and the actual rendering pass?

When I set lightmap for second bounce, and second bounce multiplier=1.0, everything gets burnt out completely. Values from 0.8 or lower work well, what value did you use in your tests (light grey material images)(how light is light grey )

I read somewhere that lightmap filtering is better turned off if used for second bounce. I tries various settings, and indeed I only see increased rendertime and no visibile result. When set to first bounce the result of filtering is obvious.

Already on the first two images you have nice AA, area shadows and glossies. What settings did you use to get these results? I tried various combinations of AA image samplers, AA filters, material glossy subdivs, light subdivs and qmc settings, but I never get a complete good result. Either the area shadow doesn't look good, or the AA on the window frame gets jagged, etc... I'm especially confused about the min samples value of qmc, and about the adaptive qmc AA. With adaptive qmc, values of 4/4 for example give me better results than 4/6 or even 6/8. But using equal numbers here is not what adaptive is used for of course...

About touching geometry, I know this is a problem for every GI renderer or radiosity solution etc. But Problem is nobody wants to model a product 2 times, one for rendering with overlapping and one for production without overlap. Don't know about archviz but usually when you get a building model, it isn't modeled with overlap either, so you don't want to remodel it of course. The check sample visibility option does a great job already on this matter!

Good to know that IR map will take longer with bright multipliers, I didn't think of it that way. What values are considered really too high (as in, what should you really avoid?) 6-8-10?


Mmmm, that's it... for now When this thread is over, I'll print it and decorate my walls with it I guess.

wouter

[themaxxer]

I would ask vlado, if he could upload the scene...
this would be much easier.
And of course it would help ME, too!

good topic, I'm also trying to get good results with your scene.

best regards
themaxxer