Condo interior finished, thx for GI help :D

[DeathCarrot]

great work fusion, i like the panoramas :thumbsup:

[sebek27]

wow awesome ! this is all C4D ??

[heretic]

What thread are you refering too when you speak of GI help? I could also benefit greatly from such information..... Can you explain your lighting set-up? The images are fantastic......!!!!

Thanks!

[FusionDG]

Originally posted by DeathCarrot
great work fusion, i like the panoramas :thumbsup: Thx :D. I’m surprised that I don’t see more people post them, they are really easy to do :)

Originally posted by sebek27
wow awesome ! this is all C4D ?? It’s funny to see someone say my work is “awesome” here, as I still feel that these fall short of what an experienced C4D user can so, but thank you very much!

Everything except importing the walls, ceiling, floor, cabinet frames, doors and other “structural” stuff from ArchiCAD. The rest was modeled and rendered in C4D XL7.

I did a very minimal touch up in Corel Photo-Paint to add my company logo, add some noise to the pics, and adjust some light levels in the pics and the QT panoramas.

Originally posted by heretic
What thread are you refering too when you speak of GI help? I could also benefit greatly from such information..... Can you explain your lighting set-up? The images are fantastic......!!!!

Thanks!

Hi Herectic, here is the thread. I was having one heck of a time. I think I was overthinking things and not testing the scene in a systematic way.

http://www.cgtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=39046

the lighting setup, well here it is:

I have one Light Spot outside to simulate the direct sun to show through the windows in the dining room and to cast shadows through the rails and over the roof outside

One Sky Object with a gradient applied to it that is blue at top and a brown at the bottom to simulate a sky gradient.

Then I have an Omni Light outside each window at around 20% –30% brightness to simulate ambient light coming in. I turned the glass off in the windows, figured no one may notice for still pictures, though I may turn it back on for the animation. I just noticed that I had Hard shadows on for all of these lights, I meant to have Soft shadows on. When did I change that? Oh well, I guess it kept my render times down.

Then all of the interior lights you see. I have hard shadows on for most of these lights. I would of liked to been able to minimize the interior lights effect on the GI, I think it looks too washed out with all of the interior lights on compared to just having the Omni's lighting everything from outside, but I can play with that later. I’m sure there it a way to do this with a Render Tag, but I haven’t found how to do this yet.

Any other Q’s just let me know.

Thanks,

Paul

[heretic]

Thanks for the response..... What were the final settings used for your radiosity solution.....? You mentioned 18 minute renders? This seems incredibly fast for such quality. I have never had much success using sky objects.... Any type of object based lighting always caused huge blotches in my images - so I've tried to avoid them.... What type of settings did you use for the sky object? Care to share the material formula and GI setting? All of my renderings are of interiors so any info would be a great help.....

Thanks again!

[FusionDG]

Hi heretic,

>What were the final settings used for your radiosity solution?

Dual AMD Athlon MP 2000+
1G RAM; GeForce4 Ti 4600

AA = Best
Output = 800 x 600

Strength = 100
Accuracy = 45
Prepass = 1/1
Diffuse = 1
Stochastic samples = 200
Min res = 50
Max res = 150

Oh, I put a Render tag on my walls, floors and ceilings to Render at a higher 80% accuracy setting because that is where I was getting the most evident weird black splotches.

The Sky Object was used only to light my exterior areas that were visible through the windows. It had zero effect on the interior lighting of my scene. The text applied to the Sky Object was a material that only had the Luminance channel on, and a procedural gradient shader applied to it in the Luminance channel at 300% brightness.

> You mentioned 18 minute renders? This seems incredibly fast for such quality

I used the Save Solution option in the render options. The first GI calculation took about 30 – 45 minutes I think. Then the rest were around 18 minutes.

I had real problems trying to light the scene based solely form the Sky Object. I had to crank the Radiosity strength to 1500 or so in the Render settings; or in the Material Luminance setting for the Sky Object material to even get light to show on the interior. And when I did that, I was getting weird black splotches all over the interior walls/ceilings. No matter what settings I was using, it seemed fruitless. So then some here suggested that I go back to using Omni Lights and light the scene as you’d expect the light to come in from the sun, and that seemed to work. I was using Area lights previous to that, but it was taking too long.

To find out the right levels for the Omin’s, I turned all of the lights off and then I went to each window and added one Omni light at a time, I optimized the Omni Light and Render settings, then move to the next Omni light outside the next window and left the GI settings alone but played with the Omni light brightness level.

Here’s a render of that test, rendered in about 5 minutes [not based on a saved solution] on a 1/2 prepass w/AA = Geometry. It is with all of the Omni’s outside of the windows turned on [now they have soft shadows :)] , but no sunlight Spot or Sky Object:

http://www.fusiondesigngroup.com/pics/light%20test_cgtalk_01.jpg
http://www.fusiondesigngroup.com/pics/light%20test_cgtalk_02.jpg

Hope it helps, I know how frustrating GI testing can be :)

Paul

[CosmicBear]

brilliant pictures!
where can i rent this appartment? :D and can i choose a different marble for the kitchen? :rolleyes:

the metal on the sink and fridge might look a bit weird.

did you acutally build the doors or are these textures? i'm not sure when looking at the kitchen-QT-movie.
and there's a little mistake in the first movie. it seems, that the outside-texture is not high-res enough (is that correct english?) and the window next to the door seems to be in the dark...

but again, brilliant work! i'm sure your client is really satisfied with your work!

[FusionDG]

> where can i rent this appartment?

Actually, it is a condo development for sale right now. They just poured the foundation last week. Maybe you can get an early bird special and throw my name in for good measure. Be a bit of a drive for you though I’d imagine ;)

http://www.lakegenevacondoconnection.com/Listings/ListingDetail.ASP?LID=343632

> and can i choose a different marble for the kitchen?

It’s funny that you say that because that because that is one of the more common suggestions. I really didn’t do a good job on the material for the counter :blush:

> the metal on the sink and fridge might look a bit weird.

agreed :) . I tried to use SLA’s Danel anisotrophic metal, but I couldn’t get it looking right, and it was taking a while to render, so I experimented on my own. The metal turned out, ahh, it’s o.k., but definitely room for improvement there. :D

> did you acutally build the doors or are these textures?

built them in ArchiCAD, including the casing.

> . it seems, that the outside-texture is not high-res enough

yes, that was one of my first textures that I did in C4D. it looks rather poor now, good thing it’s outside I guess :)

>(is that correct english?)
Yes ;)

> window next to the door seems to be in the dark...

You know, I noticed that too. I’m not quite sure why that is though. I’m going to have to fix that before the walk-through movie.

> brilliant work! i'm sure your client is really satisfied with your work!

Thank you. Overall it turned out at an acceptable level, but there are plenty of noob mistakes that will be corrected in future jobs. The clients seem to be happy, they paid me anyways:D

thx,

Paul

[kiwi]

Excellent work Paul :thumbsup:



For your metal surfaces are you using a metal specular setting? And I find Blinn better for shiny metal if you are not already using it :)



Great work :)



Stu.

[FusionDG]

Originally posted by kiwi
I find Blinn better for shiny metal if you are not already using it

Hi Stu, I'm glad you like the rendering. :)

Blinn..., actually, no, I didn't have the metal set to that. But I do now :D. I'll test it out, I'm looking FWD to seeing the difference.

I haven't played much with the three options for rendering under Illumination yet. The only thing that i have done is use the Oren-Nayer mode for fabric which made a noticable difference.

Best,

Paul

[kiwi]

Blinn will give you a more shiny surface :)



Stu.

[AdamT]

Glad to see these turned out really nicely! Great work.

I agree with the comments regarding the counter material. Also, the ceiling in the kitchen pic looks too dark to me--probably a result of only one level of diffusion. I'd bump that up to at least 3 and dim the lights a fair bit for a more natural distribution.

[Per-Anders]

good job, well done :thumbsup:

that should certainly do a good job of helping the client to visualise the interior well.

[FusionDG]

Hi Stu, Adam, mdme_sadie,

I re-rendered the Kitchen pic to show a metal tex that a kiwi ;) gave me to help out, and to show the lighting as it is on my new GI settings [diffuse depth = 1]. The finished Kitchen pic from above is before I had the GI settings fixed and I just used what I had and touched it up in PS.

http://fusiondesigngroup.com/pics/k%20revised02.jpg

Here the lighting is better, but still needs a little post work. And I’m getting some weird effects on my fabric it appears on the diffusion layer in PS. When I turn off the Diffuse layer in Corel Photo-Paint [my PS-like program] that greyed out fabric effect disappears] I am using Oren-Nayer Illumination setting for all fabric, but I don’t even have any diffusion selected on the fabric material in C4D, so I don’t know why there is an affect in this layer :shrug:

Thanks for all the help, it only gets better from here on out :D

Paul

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