hkabat-forum-threads PaulvMontfort's Showcase

[paulvmontfort 617]

I solved the problem. Apparently, the settings on my graphics card which I had specifically assigned to minecraft only where bugging. I switched the settings back to default and everything is fine!

[Ion_Cannon 677]

Glad you got the issue fixed, graphics cards don't always behave the way you want them to sadly

[Aaron Graham 4,417]

Lovely work on the building, keep it up.

[paulvmontfort 617]

It's about time for another update. I have to confess that my interest in this building is a bit on the low side at the moment. There are a lot of small details that have to be done and it isn't really fun to do. I'm determined to finish it though so don't worry .

 

[MTT9 187]

This is so amazing

[pineapple132 35]

Oh, my god......... that's amazing....... looks like some kind of building that belongs in Dubai.

 

I can't stop staring at it......

[Delecto 941]

[Aaron Graham 4,417]

Great work on this building.

[darn42 1,268]

Wowee, that's fantastic. Really my only comments are on the swimming pool area. Whatever the floor material there is made of isn't very convincing, I can't tell what it is, and it might be worth making it continue inside. And the water material doesn't look like swimming pool water. Make it transparent with caustics and etc. Otherwise this is a magnificent BAT.

[Xander Dax 310]

WOW!

[paulvmontfort 617]

Wowee, that's fantastic. Really my only comments are on the swimming pool area. Whatever the floor material there is made of isn't very convincing, I can't tell what it is, and it might be worth making it continue inside. And the water material doesn't look like swimming pool water. Make it transparent with caustics and etc. Otherwise this is a magnificent BAT.

 

Hmm after a closer look i noticed the pool floor wasn't rendering when the water was in it, hence the dark color. It has been fixed now . As for the floor material, here's a picture of the real thing:

 

 

I think it is actually pretty close to the real thing, but if you have any suggestions I would like to hear them

[darn42 1,268]

I think that the floorboards should have less contrast. It seems in yours that there's a big difference between the darker and light floorboards, and that there are large sections of brown and large sections of gray that are more conglomerated almost.

 

On the reference that it goes from mostly brown with a little bit of gray near the top, with the gray no more than 1 board wide, to mostly gray on he bottom with brown that is often no more than 1 wide. Your brown part of the texture should also be less saturated to fit better with the grey.  Basically, just lower the contrast between the two and make the pattern a little bit different. It's pretty close as it is though.

[paulvmontfort 617]

I'll look into it darn. For now i wanted to present some research results. I was reading about kellydale's new night lighting technique and i slightly adapted my own ideas into it. The advantage of my method is that i do not use displacement maps nor photo-metric lighting. In fact, the only light in the scene is the one from the bat rig. Also the only difference between the day and night scene is that i unhid some objects for the night scene. All materials are the same. Please tell me what you think of it. Does it look realistic, or could it be improved?

 

[darn42 1,268]

It looks good, and I think that the way youare doing it the renders are not too slow, but I prefer the displacement and photometric lighting method.

That way has drawbacks in render time but the results are fantastic. I think its worth figuring out some way to optimize the photometric lighting or using something besides the photometric that will achieve similar results as that is the most resource intensive process.

[paulvmontfort 617]

well the thing is that I'm afraid that i can't render very large projects packed with photometric lights so i'm looking for alternatives. I also would like to hear the opinion from others but it appears this thread kinda goes unnoticed sometimes  

[urielgarcia 344]

I've been following it lately and the updates are awesome.  I just haven't been commenting because I have no idea about batting. A shame though.  Great work. Awesome stuff..

[gutterclub 2,729]

It might be worth moving the thread to the Open Discussion temporarily to get my coverage...I think because you are the only one active in the HKBAT sub forum it can sometimes be missed. I follow this thread, but I kinda get lazy because you are such a great BATer I let you get on with it

[kellydale2003 2,276]

Looks like you've pretty much faked the displacement maps. IMO it looks exceptionally busy.

As for the photometric lighting, I've discovered that the majority of rendering times in the Displacement Lighting Method aren't actually displacement maps and the calculation of them. It's actually the photometric lighting, which is ultimately and thankfully adjustable to accustom the changes required to lower rendering times.

For shadows, when you're using photometric lighting near a roof top, another wall, or the lobby. I suggest you use Mental Ray Shadow Maps. It's just a quick roll-out easily changeable. There's multiple settings to decrease the render time for this one. Your shadows don't need to be 100% perfect and smooth either. It's alright if they're a little bit grainy. It's the overall illusion of shadows that matter most.

 

For photometric lighting where the shadows won't be noticeable, I suggest using Ray-Traced shadows and putting the Quad-Tree depth to a factor of 10. This will speed up the shadow calculation. Another aspect to change to speed up rendering time is changing the light distribution (in all lights - even mental ray shadow maps) to uniform spherical. Having it to something like uniform diffuse or a photometric web setting will make sure the light is relatively calculated to specified settings. This is obviously not needed considering the shadows won't be entirely important simply because they most likely won't be seen.

 

I've also found other settings in the Mental Ray Render settings that make easier calculations when it comes to photometric lighting, but I need to explore this area a lot more before I can suggest something.

Once I get more of a grip on photometric lighting and this method I will post. Thankfully the displacement map is calculated in translation time rather than the actual rendering period. You can see your translation time in the bottom status bar once your renders are finished. I could imagine with your no displacement map that the calculation is almost instantaneous.

BTW: For your little experimental lighting that you've done, It's best to put a dark box behind the glass where there are no lights and make your glass at night more transparent. This will help avoiding that tint in the light color and get more of a true effect.

 

 

EDIT: Seems like I have a minor case of dyslexia today! Used the antonyms of words instead :b

[darn42 1,268]

It makes sense that photometric lights would be more time consuming than the displacement map. As opposed to a directional light which shoots rays in 1 direction, and omni light which goes in 6 directions, photometric lights calculate light by shooting out of a photometric web and changing their intensity and such based on that web. When set to uniform spherical, all the rays go out equally in strength all 'round. Because of this, I think omni lights are a much better lightsource to use for this technique, since it relies more on illusion than accuracy. You can get good results with omni if they are set right.

 

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Back to photometric, though...

 

The reason they have this is so that people can make physically accurate lighting and IES physical lights, which completely simulate that light from the real life. This gets some really nice results in a lot of situations, but as kelly said, not useful here. 

 

Shadow maps, I don't like in large quantities. The main reason being that they are RAM hogs, and they give less accurate results. I like to use ray traced shadows in most cases, and area shadows in any case that is reliant on complete photo-realism. But area are cpu intensive so ray traced is much better for anything besides those cases.

 

---

 

Now for omni-lights. These are, as a rule, much less cpu intensive than photometric lights, and they render much faster as a result. With the right optimization, they can look pretty similar from a distance as well. I'm not too familiar with them, as I haven't really had a need to, but I do know that professionals use standard lights for many of their renders, and it ends up looking damn good, so I would have to say once we can figure them out well, there's no reason not to use them over photometric. It will solve many problems we have, and it will lower render times vs. photometric lights exponentially.

[kellydale2003 2,276]

100% Agreed Darn42!

Pretty much at this early stage in this form of lighting, the direction of displacement lighting will mainly rely on personal preference/ram limits.

I knew this was going to be a challenge especially coming to photometric lighting. Which is why I named the method "Displacement Lighting" instead of "Photometric Lighting" or something like that! haha... 

 

Interested to see what Paulvmontfort comes up with! 

[paulvmontfort 617]

well, what i did is ditch lights altogether which increases rendering times dramatically. What i'm using instead in that little test setup is a multi-sub material with 4 arch&design materials with self-illumination enabled and luminescence ranging from 0 to 1000 (0, 300, 700 1000). this material is applied to the ceiling of each room inside the building together with a MaterialbyElement modifier to randomize the light levels. Instead of using displacement maps, i made a box inside the building with the map i normally use for nightlighting the scene, in the transparency slot.

The advantage of this is that additional rendering time is minimized but the glowing material seams prone to light leaks.

[kellydale2003 2,276]

The light leaks can be due to overlapping faces, use of planes, or global settings. Usually Arch&Design doesn't encounter such things. I've never had this problem. What year is your 3dsmax?

[paulvmontfort 617]

I know that Kellydale. I made sure to keep a distance between the illuminating planes and the rest of the geometry, which minimized the problem. Still you can see some of the mullions lit up on the outside.. I use 3ds Max Design 2011 32 bit for my renders

[kellydale2003 2,276]

That late of a release shouldn't have such a problem!

 

Maybe send me a sample of your Self-Illumination and I could figure it out. Just a box with the material on it should be fine.

[Bipin 3,402]

The degree of realism here is astounding.

[urielgarcia 344]

Hi Paul, just dropping by to see your great works.  RL keep you away?  

[noahclem 262]

That's some outstanding work with lighting (always a favorite area of mine) and an extremely promising "new" building! Speaking of lighting, I was wondering if there's any chance of your Pacific Place bat getting a darknight render. It's an absolutely outstanding bat and I'd very much like to be able to use it in a diagonal grid area some friends and I are working on. Hope SimCity piques your interest again soon