I’m having a problem with this scene, it’s an underground parking lot and I have to put in a small shopping strip inside it… Everything’s working well so far, lot’s of materials have glossy reflections and at 8 subdivs they all work fine - problem began when I added glossy ref. to the asphalt material. Everything is reflected properly and without much noise EXCEPT for the lights which are reflected in an extremely noisy fashion. The reflection is of 3 tubes inside each lamp, they have a vraylightmtl encapsulated in a vraymtlwrapper so they don’t output GI. I have tried raising the asphalt materials subdivs up to 256 with no result - it become a bit less noisy, takes eons to render but still doesn’t look half as good as it should… I’ve tried changing the QMC sampler setting down to 0.1 adaptive and 0.0 noise thr. but the result is the same… Ive also tried changing the QMC image sampler to 2, 8 with 0.001 noise thrs. with no real improvement - once again, it’s a little better but not OK in any way… Also played around with color mapping, turning on sub-pixel mapping and clamp output, but it didn’t do anything.
The material settings are pretty standard, it’s an asphalt texmap with 0.96 glossy value, 128 reflection amount, and ward BRDF. No other maps - no bump map or displacement. The camera is a vrayphyscam set to still mode, f8.0 shutter 1/200th and 100 ISOs, with exposure ON. I’m rendering using LWF, output gamma in max is set to 2.2 - color mapping gamma is set to 1.0 so it doesn’t get corrected twice.
Here’s a rendering, the noise is pretty “loud” in the bottom of the image.
the noise in general is one thing. another thing are the black borders around the noisy samples. With reflections above one you should avoid sharpening filters. Sharpening filters will always increase noise and as a side-effect cause black borders around bright spots (the have negative values in the filtercurve wich filters values above 1 to values below 0 = black)
You’re right about the black border, but it doesn’t matter at the moment, i’ll correct it later… Been fooling around with the scene some more, one thing I’ve now noticed is that if I increase the material’s subdivs the reflection is dimmed a lot - i get a dim reflection with brighter dots scattered in… here’s an example at 128 subdivs (at 200% zoom):
OK, the speckled little brighter dots in the second image have nothing to do with the problem, it was an issue with a normal map I was using on the ceiling…
Ooohhh THAT… Well, let’s spill the beans as they say - we have worked with pirated software in the past BUT as the fact that i’m posting here reveals, we’re cleaning up our own act. I’m ashamed of it, but sadly the use of “warez” here in Chile is not an exception, it’s the norm, even for the established 3D production places - and when ur bidding for projects it’s just not been feasible to factor in the cost of software licenses, especially when you’re getting out-bid by punks working out of their houses who have no costs whatsoever. I read a long thread about this on this forum, and I know how most people feel about this - at least we haven’t been bidding overseas so no need to worry there… Even the Autodesk rep who sold our Max licenses admitted to it. They said “we treat the guys who actually buy the software really nicely here in Chile because most people just don’t buy them…” It is something that’s changing tho, and I for one am happy in a way because it keeps things fair within our own market, as in, it actually takes some commitment to get into the game. It’s not something I’m proud of - definitely. The name of the server is just a leftover, i’ve wanted to change it for a long time but all of our projects point to it so I’ve never wanted to disrupt the workflow.
Soooo, summing it up, we’re ashamed of having done it but we’re really working hard to clean it up. I know to most people there’s no real excuse, but I couldn’t have started a business otherwise, and that’s a fact. Just staying competitive right now while paying for the max subscriptions is hard. In any event, I’m pretty sure you’d be hard-pressed to find any other 3D production house in Chile that has as many software licenses as we do. I hope some of you out there appreciate the fact that we ARE cleaning it up. I’m really proud of the fact that we’ve been certified by the chilean Software Developers’ Association (www.ads.cl)for two years now.
Ok, I’ve kept at it and have to say it’s starting to freak me out because nothing I do seems to bring this glossy reflection back in line… If i tick clamp output and subpixel mapping it totally screws the intensity of the reflection so it seems as if it’s not even there… the only way I’ve managed to make it look somewhat passable is if i set qmc adaptive and noise threshold down to 0 and use a fixed image sampler with 8 subdivs upwards - and at 16 material subdivs it looks awful still, and a 60x80 pixel region takes minutes to render with no GI on a 3Ghz Core 2 Duo w/ 4gigs RAM - not really doable, this is a 4000x1500 rendering! I need help!!! Please!
I’m not sure if this’ll help, but… How are your light setup? I usually just make the vray lights invisible and use a standard max self-illuminated texture
for the actual light so I can get whatever amount of reflection that I like, without over exposing it. Um.. I also set it to not Receive GI, not Generate
GI and not Visible to GI.
The reason for the problems is that the light fixtures have a self-
illuminated material which is extremely bright (500 multiplier).
To work around the issue, you can do this:
1) On the glossy material for the floor, in the Options rollout,
set the “Treat glossy rays as GI rays” option to “Always” (the
default is “For GI rays only”). This will cause reflection rays from
this material to be considered GI rays and the wrapper material for
the self-illuminated one will prevent the bright material from
appearing in the reflections.
2) You can simply try to reduce the multiplier for the self-
illuminated material (it is called “Ampolleta”) to something
like 1.0.
3) Yet another option is to use a VRayOverrideMtl material for the
self-illuminated portions, where only the camera material is so bright,
and the GI/reflection materials are black.
Okay, this has been solved now by Vlado, big thnx!!! In the end I resorted to reflecting the lights themselves, but it wouldn’t work - Vlado figured out that I had to tick “ignore light normals” and untick “store with irradiance map” in order for this to work - the reasons are beyond me but it totally works. I wanted to post the solution in case anyone ever comes accross this…
I would like it if this thread could steer back to the problem I’m having, 'cos it is a doozy…