Interiors for Beginners? please help...

[roborocketpod]

This is my first attempt to learn a rendering program...and the first render I have to do for work is a pretty complicated interior render. I'm getting along fine with the interface and the studio lighting stuff is pretty easy, but im struggling with getting a good set up for the interior perspective!

questions:

1. is it best to use the sun/physical camera/GI for the shot, set lights, or use an HDRI for my environment lighting? (the room is just under the roof and will be very light during the day so i want to light the scene almost exclusively with "natural" environment lighting.)

2. im only using one material, a wood for the floor, but i get speckles all over the cieling...i think its the bump reflecting. is this the case? how do i make it stop.

3. the glass doesn't look real at all! i need a better solution.

4. im getting artifacts...what causes these?

here is a link to the image...http://flickr.com/photos/hans13/619649181/

(p.s. im trying to go for the look of the renders shown in the "vray for rhino" manuel i found in the forum...page 73!)

thanks in advance!!!

[SreckoM]

Re: Interiors for Beginners? please help...

1. Use sky system, and physical cam, then adjusting camera properties (f-stop, shutter speed, iso film sensitivity) find what overal lighting is best for your scene.
2.Well I'm not sure about this, but I think that you need higher quality GI, please post your GI settings. This is same for 4.
3.What are your's settings for glass, for what are you using glass, arhitectural thin, or solid, from picture u posted I can only conclude that you are using it for windows, than you can use settings described by Micha (I think) on 'Creating materials' tutorial on tutorial section of site.

[roborocketpod]

Re: Interiors for Beginners? please help...

GI:

IM _ -3/0 hsph 50/20
QMC _ 8 and 3

im using a sun and the physical camera....i've played with the exposure time a bit to some success but im still not getting anything professional looking.

glass:

im just using a default diffuse turned all the way transperent with a standard fresnel refelection (IOR 1.55) and a standard refraction map....i pulled these settings from one of the sample scenes.

there are actually two large glass walls in the scene...one next to the stairs (picture right...and the three door frames are all in the glass wall as well. both walls are floor to cieling glass.

http://flickr.com/photos/hans13/620918680/

the green area is whats modeled as the glass...its actually got a bit of thickness too...not just a surface.

[roborocketpod]

Re: Interiors for Beginners? please help...

i finally found micha's settings for a similar post in january...but im curious if those settings are still the best now that the sunlight is finished. a few more questions:

1. i've found the gamma correct in the global switches, but are there other menus that need to be gamma corrected as well?

2. where can you get HDRI's?

3. what are light portals?

[dalomar_cg]

Re: Interiors for Beginners? please help...

All of the artifacts that you are getting on the ceiling are poor GI settings. You will want to switch from QMC for secondaries to Light Cache. LC is much faster than QMC and you will find that you will get more bounces and thus a little brighter interior. I use LC all the time and its really great and easy to use. Subdivisions are your basic quality setting and I typically decrease the sample size from .02 to .01 or .005 (smaller samples means better detail). Also enable Use for Glossy Rays as that will speed those calculations up as well.

As far as gamma correction the only thing you need to worry about is in global switches.

With glass you will need to have your glass modeled as solid. Once you have that you will need to add refraction to your material (make sure the transparency of the diffuse layer is at 100% or white). This is the recommended physically correct way to make glass. For better architectural glass enable Affect Shadows and Affect Alpha in the refraction layer.

Hdris you can find for free from a number of places...Micha has a few of them listed Here