[Roux]

Hi All,
its been a while. Been busy gearing up to quit the day job :-)

I have started doing some architectural interiors for an ad company. I would love some feedback as I haven't tried this before.

These are smaller renders out of f-prime. The renders are taking quite a while on my dual 3.06GHz Xeon. Any tips for speeding things up but getting a realistic interior lighting result?

All comments appreciated as usual.

I will post some of these scenes for download when they are done.

Cheers,
DR

[bullet_evader]

realy realy nice... the bedroom looks super!! maybe lower the reflection on the floor a bit ( not to much ).

the kitchen also looks good, but the lightning could use some improvement. it's kinda boring i think.

[Roux]

@bullet_evader : Thanks mate. I am pretty happy with the bedroom :o (the scene at least)

The lighting in the kithcen pic does kinda suck. The layout means there is no natural light that far in. The previous pic was experimenting with panel lights under the cupboards.
Here is an earlier render I did with sligtly different lighting.
Oops - overwrote the better earlier image with fprime...

PS: Is anyone able to send me the demo for KRAYTRACER? I still can't connect to the site.

[jstarr976]

Im not really 100% when it comes to lighting but those renders look nice. The first few especially. Looks as though you are using radiosity to light the scene... since you are doing a still scene, meaning that none of the parts will be moving aside from the camera, I believe you can just bake the radiosity on the scene and then you can move the camera around freely without having to rerender the radiosity. I believe this works for walkthroughs like (Im pretty sure) you are trying to do. Either way, hope that helps... good work thus far, post new pics when possible, later.

[Roux]

@jstarr976:
Thanks for the kind words. I have thought about baking but my problem is LW baking takes longer than the individual renders at a high resolution. Is this the norm or can someone give me some tips on using baking effectively?

@bullet_evader: Forgot, the fllor is pretty shiny but the architectural types love this. It makes the place look shiny and new and more appealing than the real thing could ever hope to be. Kinda like most ad work - make it look better than reality

[Mark]

Yep, baking should take slightly longer than rendering the individual frame.

... BUT, when rendering a flythrough ... well, if you're rendering at 30FPS, then that should give you quite a saving since the baked textures should make your scene render much faster...

[morghen]

excelent interior !!
i love the bedroom

[Roux]

Thanks everyone.
I love radiosity for interior shots but its so ssssllllooooow.
I have been experimenting with non-radiosity solutions. Not entirely happy yet but what do you think?

[Roux]

Yeah! I think I have discovered my own little cheat. (decide for yourself)
It involves a non-radiosity render at full res, a single pass with MC radiosity in F-Prime at half res.
A resize and guassian blur at 4.5pixels in photoshop.
Paste the Fprime image over the original with a setting of Overlay and a fill % at about 60%.....

I should be able to script this in Pshop as an action for all rendered images and then import and overlay in DFX or Vegas

Here is a resultant frame Total time rendering about 1.30 for the non_rad at classic high AA, about 1 minute for Fprime and with scripting, about 20 seconds for post total time about 3 minutes per frame.


What do you guys think? I know its cheating but aren't all our other time saving techniques?

[AverageJoe]

oh man. my eyes bugged out when I saw that.

I suggest maybe shadow baking? I don't know if you're making a video or not.

[jstarr976]

The reason baking exists is for things like what you are doing. It bakes the radiosity onto the scene so you can save time. Since there are no characters to disrupt any shadows then you can get away with baking. I believe the actual manual for LW (or some documentation) says that one of the uses for baking is architectural flythroughs. The time taken to render a prebaked frame has to be shorter that the cheating method you are using... and you can just let LW do all the work for you, let it sit and render.

[Roux]

AverageJoe : You don't like it? or you do ? not sure which you meant


I am trying to do the baking thing but it aint happening for me. Just can't seem to get anything of quality without a MASSIVE hit in render time. I left one running (1024 x 1024) and it took 10 hours to produce something that looked like a really poor hand painted texture..
I must be doing something horribly wrong or baking does suck. I can't find any info on baking something more detailed than the LW cow.

I haven't given up yet.

jstarr976: Still trying man. Have you got any examples of a detailed object / surface and the baking settings for it?