Color mapping type vs mode

V-Ray for 3ds Max V-Ray for 3ds Max :: General
1

Hi all

So I’ve been doing some tests with UNIVERSAL following on Vlado’s post here:

Can somebody confirm what the “correct” way is suppose to be for LWF between these 4:
In max 2014 leave all max gamma on default (2.2)
Vray Gamma 2.2

1) VRay type: Reinhard, burn 0, mode “none”
2) VRay type: Reinhard, burn 0, mode “color mapping only”
3) VRay type: Reinhard, burn 1, mode “none”
4) VRay type: Reinhard, burn 1, mode “color mapping only”

2

If you use reinhard with burn at anything other than 1 (which is basically linear) then you’re going to break the ability to do a lot of compositing afterwards since reinhard is non linear. It’ll mainly affect the super bright colours though so it won’t be too much different from a normal render except a tiny bit duller. Your render times should improve a fair bit so I reckon it’s worthwhile unless you 100% have to be able to reconstruct your beauty render from the elements. Setting it to “color mapping only” will get you the speed benefits without changing the render too much from a normal linear render.

3

So you’re saying to stay linear, get speed improvement and if I don’t have to re-build the beauty, number “4” is the one to go for?

I’m getting weird results between those 4 different methods with this file:

(max 2014 vray 2.4, but I guess VRay 3 will be same)
Type VS Mode.zip (29.8 KB)

4

Yeah but to get speed improvement you’ll have to lower the burn. Reinhard with burn 1 does nothing at all, it’s linear. If you start to bring it down below one, it’ll softly start to roll down the highlights and take down the extreme bright values in your render, which makes vray’s life easier when sampling. Try 0.5 as a starting place.

5

I have found that if you balance your lighting well, you don’t need any tricks. I have been leaving everything default, which is linear.

6

Very true bobby, this is a handy one for scenes that has quite unbalanced lighting though. If you’ve got small light sources that have really high multipliers then their reflection and specular sampling can be quite time consuming - this is just a handy work around to tame them, similar to the new max ray intensity or sub pixel mapping. If you were doing a night scene lit by car headlights or streetlights then you’d have something that’d really benefit from these options.