1st test with corona

[Paul Jones]

Nice to have you on board Peter :)

[modern_babylon]

Looks nice Peter,

I remember the originals of this set well. Always liked the contrast and balance you managed with the warm/cool lighting. Looking forward to your future corona posts.

Cheers

[peterguthrie]

I did a whole load of tests, but nothing really conclusive.

- I think the main problem may be the IES lights, has there been progress in this area in the daily builds?
- changing light samples multiplier from 2 to 5 made the most noticeable improvement for the same rendertime.
- adding a portal made no noticeable difference.
- in the original set I had the MSI at 400. Changing to 100 was an OK trade-off. Dropping to 20 made the image noticeably darker.

[peterguthrie]

p.s. thanks for the warm welcome!

[Ludvik Koutny]

I did a whole load of tests, but nothing really conclusive.

- I think the main problem may be the IES lights, has there been progress in this area in the daily builds?
- changing light samples multiplier from 2 to 5 made the most noticeable improvement for the same rendertime.
- adding a portal made no noticeable difference.
- in the original set I had the MSI at 400. Changing to 100 was an OK trade-off. Dropping to 20 made the image noticeably darker.

400 is way wayyyy too much...  Even 100 is too much...  but of course default (20) will cause some bias. MSI is really a trade-off value, it let's you to adjust ratio between bias and rendering speed, as for IES, i think there are some improvements made in very recent builds, but those are unstable at the moment. If you have access to dailies, you could try 2013-09-17 build ;)

[Ondra]

The daily builds have support for the standard 3dsmax lights, so you could use a photometric light with IES profile, that generates zero noise. This is currently faster than proper area lights with IES, because I haven't gotten to sampling directional light yet. And IES is in its core nothing else, than directional light.

[peterguthrie]

thanks Keymaster and Rawalanche, will try daily build as soon as I build up the courage.

Just a quick question re: HD Cache, are there settings there I could be tweaking or should I leave them as default?

[Ludvik Koutny]

thanks Keymaster and Rawalanche, will try daily build as soon as I build up the courage.

Just a quick question re: HD Cache, are there settings there I could be tweaking or should I leave them as default?

Lowering precomp density to 0.1 is good for very quick previews, if you want to iterate quickly on something, just be sure to put it back to 1.0 for finals.

Then PT samples in HDcache increase sample accuracy, so you may try 1024 or even 2048 if you have any scenario that is very complex for indirect lighting.

And positional sensitivity increases sample density...  increasing it makes it more stable in animations, and could also improve accuracy for stills.

Non the less, all around, defaults work mostly fine. I usually raise HDcache PT samples to 1024 for finals, and lower precomp density to 0.1 for quick previews.

[peterguthrie]

thanks Keymaster and Rawalanche, will try daily build as soon as I build up the courage.

Just a quick question re: HD Cache, are there settings there I could be tweaking or should I leave them as default?

Lowering precomp density to 0.1 is good for very quick previews, if you want to iterate quickly on something, just be sure to put it back to 1.0 for finals.

Then PT samples in HDcache increase sample accuracy, so you may try 1024 or even 2048 if you have any scenario that is very complex for indirect lighting.

And positional sensitivity increases sample density...  increasing it makes it more stable in animations, and could also improve accuracy for stills.

Non the less, all around, defaults work mostly fine. I usually raise HDcache PT samples to 1024 for finals, and lower precomp density to 0.1 for quick previews.

exactly what I needed, thanks!

[blackhaus]

Welcome aboard Peter!

pretty interesting tests, the lighting is amazing, thanks corona for make this
so easy, with a good understanding of lighting/camera/photography we can reach
very good results.
As I always say, at the end of the day what really matter is the image.

Hope see new stuffs from you my friend,
Cheers
Fernando