VRay-like interior renders with mental ray???

#2221

It’s a little dark on my two work monitors, both different (ViewSonic 22" and Acer 22"), but I think the lighting is great. Very soft and smooth, but I’d like to see a bit more firelight, at least in the specularity on the chairs for example. If you’re using a GI light for the fire (photons), perhaps turn the exponent down? Default is 2, the firelight might look better at a 1.3 or so, and reach further into the scene.

I really like the woodwork here, and the fireplace surround looks great. I installed one that looks almost exactly like it, recently! The tile color scheme isn’t my favorite, but to each their own. It looks realistic for certain, and if you like those colors then go for it!

#2222

infernaldarkness, thanks for the response and ideas. i did some reworkings and re-renderings, nothing majorly different. just some firelight boosting and subtle specular changes. just so you know though, the fire is comped from a separate scene. The room is gamma corrected and i had a real miserable time trying to gamma correct the fire to look correctly in the scene. So i just comped it in photoshop, much less of a headache.

Not sure which fireplace color scheme i prefer… enjoy.

Than there was the nightmare of how annoying mentalray got. for no reason (nothing added to the scene) mentalray’s FG ray computing was terrible, hours long just for ray computation, than came the rendering. I was basically getting no progress with the batch render, until i messed with the BSP settings a bit. Still not sure why, even older scenes were having a problem.

#2223

A work done by me in max mr

<a href=“http://s401.photobucket.com/albums/pp97/manish_mv/?action=view&current=portugese_restaurant.jpg” target="_blank"><img src=“http://i401.photobucket.com/albums/pp97/manish_mv/portugese_restaurant.jpg” border=“0” alt=“portugese restaurant”></a>

#2224

playing with mental ray…
i used phys sun & sky + to portal light (for each windows) and mia_materials
and mia_photographic_exposure
not very satisfied with some shader…is there someone who got some cloth or velvet preset for mia_material?
c&c are welcome.
scene credit to evermotion

#2225

Hi guys,

I posted this problem in the main forum but haven’t received any replies yet, hoping I will get some here.

I did some IES tests and the only way I could get soft shadows was when using a spotlight with area light turned on.

It seems that Mental Ray for maya is yet again incapable of handling certain tasks which are well implemented in the 3ds max version.

 Without Soft Shadows
  [[img]http://img172.imageshack.us/img172/9926/61120204me2.jpg[/img]](http://imageshack.us/)
  
  
  With Soft Shadows
  A lot of the IES light information gets blurred.
  [[img]http://img232.imageshack.us/img232/9721/55978558cm6.jpg[/img]](http://imageshack.us/)
  
  
  Without Ies profile
Now we faster shadow calculation
  [[img]http://img516.imageshack.us/img516/3104/68377245zp1.jpg[/img]](http://imageshack.us/)
  
  
  Notice that there is also no light decay taking place when using IES, wich is highly undesirable.
  
  Does anyone know what's the best workflow for obtaining soft shadows with an IES profile? and am I right in saying that the max implementation of mr is more advanced than maya? a small example of this is that you can see a preview shape if the ies in the viewport and there are far more settings you can change on the lights including atmospheric interactions.

Then again, the grass always seems greener on the other side.

#2226

Imho it look pretty darn good! The lighting is spot on, but I really don’t see why
someone put them peppers on the table? :wink: And if you really want them there they
need some better materials, and I think you can take down the bump of the flooring
just a tad.

#2227

The Way Vray Style Interior renders can be achieved in mental ray for maya is by using the importons + irradiance particles rendering tecnique im working on a scene at the moment which i will post in the next few days.

#2228

@ visua: thanks for comment…agree with you some material need more work.
@ Hoerboer: it looks like that getting soft shadow with ies in maya 2009 doesn’t work well
but it work in 2008 …can’t really help

#2229

i used maya 2009, i’m also getting trouble if i used IES file…the light direction is opposite. i wanted left, the light is appeared in right…confuse a lot with it.

#2230

Hey SaitKuman1983, mate would love to see what you come up with once you finished. if you could share some of your render setup for comparison I’m sure they guys here would dig that too! I know I would :applause:

Cheers

#2231

Hoerboer
you haven’t to use the mib.lightphotometric, try with a point light with a IES profile from the slot mental.raytab / light.profile, than play with the light radius for soft shadows.
take a look here with the “IES light profile exploited” enjoy :buttrock:

tuuhia
Very good and cleaned work,
can you tell us about your workflow? fg depht, point density… are you using the Global Illumination?
Very photorealistic!

#2232

thanks for the comment,here my workflow…first a play with the lighting with white shader for all object…then i apply textures and different type of material…and adjust lighting when need…
for lighting i use phys sky & sun with portal light for each windows…and i use mia_exposure_photographic (with aproriate setting for indoor)…all shaders are mia_material…and use builtin ambient occlusion
here my render setting:
min/max sample level: 0 - 2
color contrast: 0.03
Multi pixel filtering : mitchell : 4 - 4
raytracing : 4 - 4 - 8
FG rays: 120
point density: 0.100
point interpolation : 50

tips:before i render in full resolution, i render the scene in lowres…and freez the fg map and reuse it with this time high setting.

no fg bounce use this time…lens shader and portal light was more than enough for this scene…

hope it help

#2233

The magic button in MR and magic trick in Maya for architectural work is the Image Based Lighting.

#2234

I wouldn’t say that no, care to elaborate?

#2235

It is a very interesting solution, good for render time…
thank you!
The carpet is a fur-volume or fur-primitive? I’m wrong? it looks very good!

#2236

Yeah… I might elaborate:

-interior scene : ibl sphere/plane outside the structure, 3 spotlights with mapped lightshot per window, one mapped lightshot per lamp or increase lamp’s glow intensity, lens shader to control your exposure, gi, (fg, caustics),…

-exterior scene : ibl sphere/plane around the scene, lights with mapped shot to intensify selected models and shadows… if necessary, lens shader, gi, (fg, caustics),…

ibl makes realistic and fast render because light is already made of realistic bitmaps and renderers don’t need calculation to create it…

of course, we could also do it regularly, controlling all the light components (spots,directional, area…) manually and playing with renderers (gi, irradience…) with exactly same result as ibl but working and rendering time would not be the same…
:applause:

#2237

My question is concerning the Maya Mental Ray Portal light setup. How is everybody getting rid of the speckles that come with the area light shadows. My area lights are outside the window behind the frame. The area light rays are being set anywhere from 32 - 128 and still getting speckles… and my render times are feelling it. If this isn’t high enough, then what levels do i need? I am trying to render for animation so I’d like to get the render times down to around 5 min after freezing FG. Thanks

#2238

Hey mcbridecasey - Yeah there isn’t much information out there (yet) on Portal Lights and how to use them effectively. If anyone can share a bit would be great, but mate check out this thread here on the forums - http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=87&t=621727 some of the guys have touched a little on the use of Portal Lights and how they went about it among other things (Importons, etc) - might be worth a read.

In any case, I think that the mr Portal Light is something overdue in Maya and hopefully it will start to get more “air time” and analysis on forums etc, specially with the need for Arch Viz renders to be photoreal and life like…it all comes down to light (natural/ incandescent) Just my 5cents :shrug:

Hope this helps mcbridecasey

Cheers
Pat

#2239

Portal lights really aren’t “overdue”, since they’ve been out for two years now.

Also, simply “Googling” Maya portal light brings up a wealth of information. They’re not difficult to implement, although I agree with Casey that they can be a pain to refine and get looking good, in some cases.

#2240

My bad, I have recently converted from Maya 8.5 to 2009 at work - Didn’t know that its been around since 2008… hope the link helps though.