Wow really great renders man! How'd you manage to get the walls so white without being blown out / losing contrast in the details?
Mind sharing your ceramic and marble material settings? Having trouble over here finding the right IOR / reflection amount!
The White wall here is only simple diffuse material. It would be nice if it had bump and reflection, but sometimes it's barely noticeable, and it would have huge performance cost.
I am not exactly sure what was the exact RGB value but it's mosty between 180 to 220. I might check, but it should be much closer to 180 (that's pretty grey :- ) .. ).
It helps when the space have lot of windows, which is the case here.
More diffuse light (one without shadows) produces more even lightning, so here I choose one, that have only slight shadows for object definition, but is otherwise mostly uniform.
Light is casted even from outside floor, so if you watch my HDRi closely, you will notice the ground is slightly grey (btw Corona Sky is also setup in this way by default, which is very cool !).
If you HDRi has BLACK lower half (like most for archviz), then either modify it, or use some big plane.
Tone mapping. I used native Corona highlight crushing, I think Value 3-6. I do not go higher, because it can produce very dull picture. I am not sure how exactly it works, but use it with caution.
I much rather prefer under-exposing slightly, and boosting midtones with curves in PS. I save as 16bit .exr and uses curves inside Magic Bullet Looks, where I use simple post. Few Curves, Vignette.
There is big difference in LOCAL contrast, to total contrast. The latter is very nicely done with S-Curve, or even better, masked SoftLight layer blending. For the former it is best to use some plugin from NIK or Topaz.
Sorry for lack of illustration, just writting from head now. Maybe I'll update it later.
MATERIALS:
I am very ashamed when people ask me, because it is my very weak point. I don't believe in complicated shaders, I have very little time for that. So everything is only hi-res diffuse, and reflection map. Not even bump map mostly. The IOR is big battle, it's true it's very hard to find out where it should be. I never use fallof curve, always IOR. In 98perc. it is 1.6. Reflection mostly 30-60perc in RGB value, not higher (except for mirror, and some glass).
When I get to office, I might check those materials from you, as I don't remember exact settings. The texture is from CG-Source btw. Best source for anything.
I'm a huge fan of the visual style of your works - not only these posted here. I would call it "highly detailed simplicity". :)
Thank you Maru, we could not wish for better compliment with Veronika ! Very appreciated.
Haha, one more thing I forgot about those white wall question. Btw I had to use sometimes a lot of tricks to get it with Vray. And here is the reason: Maximal sample intensity.
The default 20 is not enough imho for interior scenes. It produces much different "gradient" between highlights and shadows. Naturaly, it looks best at 0=fully unbiased. Then,
you get excellent light diffusion, midtones are huge ! Local contrast is best. But at great cost of sampling and fireflies. Maybe adaptivness will solve this ? Not sure, this was done with
Alpha 5 and I used value 50-80 I think, depending on picture. The big difference can mostly be seen in how bright gets the ceiling. At low value it is dark, while the walls already get burned.
At Unbiased settings, the ceiling is much more closer to walls in contrast. The whole settings can get much brighter before burning. And it can't be compensated with exposure.
Imho it only looks photorealistically when it is set at 0. There might be few reasons (GI caustics ? Some secondary reflections,etc.. didn't study too much) Heh, tough choice tough :- ).
Thankfully I could afford 20+ hours per each picture (but it was nicely clear after 6-8 mostly).
Private messages: Hey guys, I do plan on sharing tutorial. I don't think a scene, I am not really comfortable with that yet, sorry. But it will be more important to write why I use this and that. I am using a new scene that features both exterior and interior, even with vegetation. Expect in 10 days maybe. Not later, because than I will travel the world :- ).
And maybe if some of you are going to ACADEMY DAYS 4 in Venice in week/two, let's have a chat there !
