[V8i] How to improve Luxology Renders?

I've been testing Luxology over the last few days and I'm really not sure how to improve the test renders I've been making. My concern is that the lighting doesn't look that great and some materials aren't rendering out close to the pattern map appearance. The image below is using the 'Realistic Lighting' settings from the wiki rendered with external good but to me it looks far from impressive, even at this early stage without post-processing:

  • Hi Barry,

    If you want to send me your model I could tweak the lighting and materials and send it back. One thing that stands out is the galvanized texture is repeating and could look a lot better if you used a texture replicator. You would need to make sure you use the Local Projection option, you could get this dialed in using a single texture but if you have more that might actually work better. To dial in the material settings for a texture replicator you will need to use fast preview render so that you can see the changes to the material as you edit it.

    using 3 different seamless galvanize textures....

    I also made the material a bit reflective with blurry reflections...

    Here's example Fast Preview render...

    Now the texture for galvanized material is completely random and not repeating. To get the lighting to look better try using an environment such as Light Probe Park Sunny.

    I would make the conduit a different material than the galvanized more like aluminum.

    I have attached the file I used and the textures you can import my galvanized material already setup from the DGN.

    Cheers,

    Jerry

    test_galvanized.zip

  • Hi Jerry,

    Your Galvanised material looks nice, It looks like you are using Connect Edition however I am only using V8i SS4 at the moment so I'm assuming the Texture replicator isn't an option for me.

    HDRI does improve the renders ( do you typically keep solar & skydome enabled when using an HDRI?)

    What I'm uncomfortable with is the brightness/contrast sliders. I'm more familiar with 3DS Studio Max & V-Ray using a physical camera to control exposure via F-Stop/Shutter Speed/ISO values to achieve consistent physically correct results whereas these sliders feel exactly the opposite.

  • Yes sorry no Texture Replicators in V8i you need CONNECT Edition for that feature. You could attach material projections and then edit them to change scaling, offset and rotation to help randomize the texture.

    I typically use solar light but no flash or sky dome. You can control the contribution of solar and environment indirect lighting using the brightness slider on the Environment Setting dialog.

    We also added environment importance sampling in CONNECT Edition which greatly improves shadows and contrast when using Environment images. If you can use CE you would be better off, render performance is almost double that of V8i due to improvements in Render Engine modo 10 in CE vs. 6 in V8i.

    If you look at the environment dialog you will see Override Existing Lights as option, when enabled the scene will be lit entirely by the Light Probe, with Fast Preview rendering you can then try rotating the light probe to get the illumination you are after.

    Are you attending the monthly Visualization SIG?

    Cheers,

    Jerry