What to use for accurate light calculation?

[thev]

In fact, V-Ray will give you accurate results, so long as you set up your scene properly (e.g. use correct scene scale, photometric lights, plausible materials etc). Using the light cache for secondary bounces will probably give the most accurate results. You can use either the 3ds max lighting analysis render element, or the VRayIlluminance one to check out the physical lighting in your scene. You can then use the physical camera to display those physical units in a photographic way.

Best regards,
Vlado

[aglick]

Do you know of the new light analysis toolset in 3DSMax Design 2009?


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Exposure

Use Exposure™—exclusive to 3ds Max Design—to simulate and analyze sun, sky, and artificial lighting in a 3D scene.



Exposure lets architects create light measurement grids, of any shape at any location in 3D space; grids can be scaled and rotated.
Light metering functionality includes a choice of graphical or file output.
The 3ds Max Design sun and sky models—validated by the scientific community—are available through Exposure.
A quick-settings dashboard interface helps access the various aspects of the software used in light simulation such as render settings, light settings, and material settings.
The feature set has been designed to assist architects in evaluating light intensity in their designs. This can help facilitate the evaluation of indoor environmental quality required, for example, for LEED. 8.1 certification.

[thev]

The Exposure toolset is exclusively created for mental ray though, so you are stuck with it, if you want to use it. Even so, the correctness of your results will depend on your render settings, so you need to be careful with that. There should be guidelines posted by Autodesk for setting this properly, in order to ensure physical correctness - just using the Exposure tools is not in itself enough to guarantee it.

Best regards,
Vlado

[okmijun]

Thank you all very much on those answers.
@BOXXLabs
Unfotunatly MR is a spanish village for me!

@Vlado
You mean if I use LC and IES lighting, the result should be very accurate?
What to use for 1st bounces? QMC?
I do not know much about VRay, do you maybe have some sample about this?

[aliceinchains]

I think Vray is the best way to achieve realistic results in architectural visualisations.That`s my own opinion,of course :) But if you want to give it a try,there`s a lot of tutorials on the net,which can be useful for you.Look at evermotion.org.The Vray Sun system is an easy way to create realistic indoor or outdoor illumination,but it takes a long time to render,so I prefer to use target direct light and HDRI sometimes.For primary bounce try with irradiance map,and for secondary-light cache,and if you want more accurate light effect-try quasi monte carlo instead of light cache.For antialisaing filter i think Mitchell-Netravali with Adaptive QMC.Its important to set the color mapping.I usually use Reinhard or Exponential.Its a long question to explain.And you also can use the vray frame buffer to control gamma.I`m sorry that i`m not giving examples,but i just bought a new pc and it`s totally empty :)
If you are intrestet,you can also take a look at gnomon workshop`s "Global Illumination for exteriors".It`s really helpful.
Good luck :)

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