Messages

556

Gallery / Re: Interior cafe

« on: 2013-11-01, 15:48:17 »

The goggles, they do nothing!

557

Gallery / Re: wooden house

« on: 2013-11-01, 15:44:37 »

Looks really good man! Is the wood modelled or bump mapped?

558

[Max] General Discussion / Re: IES lights making things extremely noisy / slow?

« on: 2013-10-25, 15:13:33 »

no, you can use any IES. The trick is that 3dsmax lights are always pointlights (even with area shadows), which are easier to compute for nontrivial directional distributions. This should be much faster than either using complicated IES + coronalights, or occluding coronalights with geometry.

Thanks for the reply!

So, after some more testing it seems that the ceiling coffer lights are what actually appear to be causing most of the noise! I guess it is a worst case scenario for GI as the lights are hidden in the ceiling and light the rest of the scene via pure bounced light. I might have to fake this one with some invisible rectangular lights around the recessed ceiling borders...

559

[Max] General Discussion / Re: IES lights making things extremely noisy / slow?

« on: 2013-10-25, 13:59:47 »

some IES files + area lights can be quite inefficient now, you can for now use 3dsmax photometric lights with IES profiles instead (in daily builds)

Ah I see, so rather than using a custom ies file it's better to use a 3dsmax preset one (for example the recessed 250w wallwash)? Should I enable corona area shadows, or leave this unticked?

Would using a regular 3ds max spotlight with corona shadows be quicker? Or would the quickest solution be to create a Corona sphere light inside of a hidden piece of occluding geometry (for example a hemisphere with a shell modifier on it)?

Thanks

560

[Max] General Discussion / Re: IES lights making things extremely noisy / slow?

« on: 2013-10-25, 13:37:06 »

Already tried upping both the path tracing and light samples multipliers but they don't seem to help.

561

[Max] General Discussion / IES lights making things extremely noisy / slow?

« on: 2013-10-25, 12:44:08 »

Hi guys I've been having some trouble with IES / down lighting recently. When adding in IES lights things seem to take 3-8x longer to render due to all of the additional noise.

The 1st attachment shows the scene lit with just an HDRI and an emitter material for the ceiling light, render time ~ 15 mins.
The 2nd attachment has all of the IES lights enabled (photometric light type in max with Corona shadows ticked), render time ~ 40 mins
The 3rd attachment uses a very dark HDRI and all of the IES lights enabled. This one took around 50 mins, you can see the extent of the noise...

All renders are using the same exposure with basic render settings (HD cache, adaptive: 4, latest daily build) One thing that did strike me as odd is that I had to crank the lm values of the lights to 35000.0 else they were too dark.  Exposure is set to 2.75, highlight compression is set to 4.

All glass is set to hybrid mode, the pool is a single plane set to onesided (solid), but with "casts shadows" unticked. Trees are opacity mapped and the RGB of all white materials are set to 180.

Also I'm rendering this on an overclocked 3930k with 32gb ram. I completed the Corona benchmark scene in about 3 minutes 20.

I don't particularly need to use IES lights, I just need some down/spot lights - so anything that can shave some render time off will be a massive help.

Thanks for all suggestions / tips!

562

Work in Progress/Tests / Re: Juraj's WIPS/Theory/Questions

« on: 2013-10-25, 12:20:40 »

Hey man, since you're doing pretty large renders and seem to get pretty noise free results (I know you struggle with this like the rest of us but those renders would not look that clean overnight rendered with my rig) what is your hardware like? I'm in the process of upgrading my 4 year old rig. You might have already answered this elsewhere but I couldn't find it.

Also, did you get satisfactory results with PT+HD eventually? I mean contrast-wise specifically - after much experimenting I still have no idea if those sweet dark PT+PT shadows can be reproduced with HD cache.

I am pretty sure PT+PT gives me much better visual look, the details are just so crisp..and nice. Maybe it's just haptic, and the difference might not actually objectively be that big, but to me it seems like there is.
But I used only PT+HD for every single commercial render I did with Corona for past months, not a single time pt+pt.

Actually I struggle with hi-res, but mostly because the frame-buffer acts strangely at high resolution, it stutters, freezes, and I wonder if it's just framebuffer or if the engine struggles as well, so I stay quite "low" imho :- ) at 4k mostly = 3840x2160px. I dislike lesser resolutions as they don't show the detail I would like, and just look oversimplified/blurry. There's never enough resolution ! :- D I was very stunned when my current client showed me their catalogue photos (that I need to match in quality) and they were photographed by PhaseOne camera with 12 000px in size.... just crazy. Of course they were later downsampled, but the detail and clarity was stunning, it even overshadowed NikonD800 which I find to be landmark of quality for architectural photography (among digital cameras, not taking into account something like medium-format)

I use few 3930k rigs, Asus X79 boards, gtx 670/760 with 4GB ram, 32-64GB ram (Corsair/Kingston 1600 low-profiles), Fractal Cases (R3 and XL versions). I also have one old 2600k but I recently found out its performance is same as my laptop (haswell i7 4800HQ) so this one will go to trash and I will buy 3 another 4930k now. They're very sweet price/performance. But in spring I will build atleast one E5 26xx v2 xeon machine, but at the moment I need quantity as well.

I never use distributed in Corona or Vray but instead render full night on each computer per one picture (10 hours or so atleast per picture no matter what). It's the easiest solution for me and I quite like such primitive ways.

I find buying HW much cheaper then using render-farms (Rebus), I do a lot of animations now and the calculation at Rebus is always like 2000 euros per minute at economy tarif of animation and at that price....I prefer to buy another computer and keep it for next 3 years of its moral life. It's also more user-friendly when working with plugins and latest software versions.

I am super big fan of HW, have been building my own computers for past 10 years, so if you want to discuss anything HW related I am very open to it :- )

Damn, I didn't know rebus could work out that expensive! Like you said, might as well buy the most high end machine for that sort of money. I'm currently running an overclocked 3930k @ 4.2ghz with 32gb Corsair 1600hmz ram + GTX 670 in a Fractal Define XLR2 case (the sound proofing definitely helps when cranking the fans). Those v2 xeons are damn pricey though, I'm not sure the price / performance ratio would be worth it tbh? (vs a watercooled 4.8ghz 4930k for example)...however I can't wait for the 8-core Haswell CPU's to drop next year!

563

Gallery / Re: kry gallery

« on: 2013-10-10, 13:15:52 »

coronasun+coronasky.

Sun mult 0.1-0.2

Cheers man, did you leave the sky settings at default too?

yep,sky - default settings.

Awesome, thanks again! *time to experiment*

564

Gallery / Re: kry gallery

« on: 2013-10-10, 12:02:16 »

coronasun+coronasky.

Sun mult 0.1-0.2

Cheers man, did you leave the sky settings at default too?

565

Gallery / Re: kry gallery

« on: 2013-10-10, 09:54:12 »

Amazing lighting! What's your setup?

566

[Max] General Discussion / Re: Corona Free models server

« on: 2013-10-06, 22:30:52 »

I'm in! Sounds like a good to idea to get some basic materials done like architectural glass, curtains, lamp shades e.t.c

I've got some to share if needed!

567

Work in Progress/Tests / Re: Juraj's WIPS/Theory/Questions

« on: 2013-10-03, 17:15:14 »

Hi Agent,

1: The interior lights are 4500K :- ) The white balance is set at neutral 6500K. It is almost always there, unless very specific need.
2: For exterior, no I didn't, I wanted the very slight blue cast it had. I might if I wanted to go for overcast scenario, but this one I called "fake dusk" as it is, just underexposed :- ).
3: The water material...isn't even material. It's ridicously basic, just had no time to even give it properly painted bump map.

It's IOR 1.333, super weak bump/noise set on Fractal, FULL refractivness and reflectivness (RGB 255/255/255), solid refractive mode. I think it is just plane, not cube, but I think it wouldn't play any role in this angle anyway. Not sure from head

Cheers for the reply man - I might have to start adopting your approach of leaving the white balance at 6500k and adjusting the other light sources instead given the quality of your work!

568

Work in Progress/Tests / Re: headoff's 'gallery'

« on: 2013-10-03, 17:12:23 »

That last render is awesome! Was that still at MSI = 1? I've been putting it to 400 to try and get the ceiling's in my scene whiter / less grey.

What are your highlight compression settings and exterior light sources?

569

Work in Progress/Tests / Re: Juraj's WIPS/Theory/Questions

« on: 2013-10-02, 20:19:14 »

Wow that last render is INSANE! Would you mind answering a few quick questions?

1. What colour temperature are the interior lights? You've really nailed the colour balance of the scene.
2. Did you still desaturate the HDR image for this shot?
3. Mind sharing your water material? I've been completely hopeless so far with water in Corona.

570

[Max] Resolved Feature Requests / Re: RenderToTexture support

« on: 2013-10-02, 00:19:53 »

+1 on this feature. If this was implemented I could leave vray for good! It's absolutely crucial for creating lightmaps for 3D games (can you imagine a 3D walkthrough with Corona quality in real-time?)

This would also speed up fly through animations by thousands of percent!