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eyezac
11-03-2005, 12:41 AM
The jump from 3ds max 4 to 7 was a big one, all these cool new lighting options are great. However, I am struggling to get a simple exterior scene (lit with radiosity and a daylight system) to look half decent.
i keep ending up with the grass in the scene reflecting on the eaves of the roof, the walls and guttering. looks like an ugly-green-badly-lit-matrix-style-mansion.
(i would have included the images i've rendered, but as far as i can tell i can only include links to already online images, is this correct?)
i have checked that the scale of the building is correct, and that the grass texture map isn't self illuminated or reflective, still no luck.

i like the effect that mental ray with GI gets, the textures seem to look 'richer' but the rendering time is huge and i'd need to add another light to get the house too be lit properly.

so, does anyone have any ideas about what i'm doing wrong?

thanks
Ian Jones
11-03-2005, 05:36 AM
Check out the lighttracer... look in the help for a quick tute. Set it up so that your combining a skylight with a directional light acting as a sun and casting shadows and as long as your overall light output is around 1 you should get reasonable results. Lightracer can be fast but it can also be slow with large amounts of geometry, which is where mental rays capabilites combine with final gathering come in. It's a fine balance, a difficult decision.. what I suggest is that you try both. You can control the 'colour bleed' with both systems which is where your matrix green effect is coming from.
eyezac
11-03-2005, 02:00 PM
Thanks Ian.

Yeah I will check out both the light-tracer and mental ray some more. I guess i was hoping my days of playing with custom lighting rigs was over... Then again I'd be out of a job if that was the case.
I really did prefer the way mental ray rendered the textures, it seemed to pick up the normal mapping much better than the radiosity system did, so i might go that route then.

also, anyone know how to include an image file from my comp in a post? does it need to be a url?

zac

Hey, didn't see you were from oz, i'm living in the US right now, i miss home.
eyezac
11-04-2005, 06:31 PM
Ok Here is a render from www.nc3d.com - they do a lot of beautiful architectural stuff. I am aiming for a rendering that approximates this.

And here are a couple of mental ray rendered images I have done (the house model is not my own and i'm sorry i forgot where i got it so i cannot give due credit for it, sorry whoever made it!), all i have done here is texture it and tried to light it.

If you look at the eaves, and general tint you can see that one is rather green (final gathering was enabled on this) while the other is more like the coloring i am after (final gathering disabled). yet both look unrealistically lit.
i am using a daylight system alone, and i have tried it with both radiosity and the lighttracer. i have found that mental ray gives better looking textures so am trying to work with that.

so what am i doing wrong here? i have played with the 'lighting override' settings on the grass material to try and cut the color bleed/reflectance that turns up on the eaves, but all i end up with is a darker scene.

so thoughts anyone? help? outdoor lighting tutorials? should i forget 'fancy' lighting systems and go back to standard lights? i do like what Montree T. from smoke 3d has done with standard lights; http://www.cgarchitect.com/news/newsfeed.asp?nid=1523 but i'd like to work out radiosity and or mental ray to get realistic results.
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