Where did all shadows and blacks go?

[Ivan1982]

Over the years somehow shadows and blacks disappeared.
I am talking about light contrast and correlation between light intensity and shadow intensity, they are simply far from anything resembling real life scenario.
This is not so pronounced on GPU as it is on CPU, again it is not great on GPU either.

It seems like there are more bounces than necessary.
I am fully aware that this might be feature to allow more light uniformity and better light transfer throughout the scene by default and probably being easier on engine and render times, however it is preventing darks from forming.

Is there a line that i can type to lower that value (number of secondary bounces).
Secondary multi. As it is like now is not an option as i want that initial light traverse intensity just at sharper tail off, similar to what contrast slider would do, contrast is not an option as it affects image and it is not something i can control lighting of the scene.


Example:
100 bounces lowered to 20 so that light samples extinguish much sooner and turn black.

[super gnu]

im not sure there has been any negative change in the "shadows and blacks" in vray generally.. but you could a) darken your materials, b) use bruteforce for secondaries where you can control the bounce depth, or, as you mentioned, change the lightcache bounces from default. (it used to be exposed in the interface, im sure its scriptable)

[Ivan1982]

Thanks, well i don't know why (maybe because of some optimizations) it seems to me Vray steadily went to more washed out "uniform" look, as much as BF gives expected results i can't say it's an viable option, I even played around with AO it did not give anticipated results.
That LC bounce was neat feature, i hope there is way to control it in 5.

[dean_dmoo]

There was a thread discussing this in relation to corona, which has 25 bounces iirc, and seemed to have a higher base contrast according to the threadstarter. Can't remember if there was a follow up to it though.

[Ivan1982]

Ah yes, Corona vs Vray battle...

Problem is that most confident claims in such threads are utter rubbish and direct opposite of truth so i find very difficult to draw any conclusion in such discussions, there are ton of features unsupported in between engines so you have to balance it out and choose one eventually.

BF+BF is no way near usable solution even though it gives best results, GPU gives better results with LC in that regard but you need to fit scene in GPU and sometimes that is not possible.

Since no one from CG responded i guess there is no way to lower LC bounces via line, which is shame, lowering Max Ray Intensity or completely turning it off along with lowering LC bounces to 5 or 6 did job done in next.

This problem is most pronounced with white spaces, even though i never go with albedo over 150 for whitest white there is no clear cut of for shadows and blacks, they are hanging in grey land.

Anyhow, thanks for suggestions.