Hi all,
I have been playing around with creating some still renders, The shadows were too dark so I went to the expert setting and changed the colour of the shadows from a black to a grey. Now the shadows are a good brightness, but the interior of a model now looks too bright as if there are powerful lights switched on.
What settings can I used to achive a darker interior whilst keeping a lighter shadow?
lighing used = only solar with physical colour, intensity of 60 [356 Lux] 90 cloud, 3 Air Quality. Rendered on Exterior Good, 1800px x 1100 px [about]
Image above = Shadows too dark, interior of wheelhouse looks good.
Image above = Shadows good, Interior wheelhouse too light.
[Ignore the different hull colours I've been asked to come up with some colour variations]
Hi Myles,
I would recommend that you change the shadow color back to black. Use interior good to get an extra bounce of light. Make sure on the global illumination tab in the rendering settings dialog that you have Indirect Caustics set to Refraction.
My guess is that you are using Exterior Good and Indirect Caustics is set to None which means none of the indirect light from you environment enters the wheelhouse.
Cheers,
Jerry
Well here it is with the shadow colour set back to black with render setup Interior Good and indirect caustics set to refraction.
Again the shadows look way too dark, what settings can be used to lighten the shadows a little?
And the latest attempt, using interior good but putting the shadow colour back up to a grey [rgb value 20,20,20 - the previous one was into the hundreds] and also using a value of 15 for Spread angle to dissipate the shadows. The interior of the wheelhouse is perhaps a tiny bit on the light side but I think this is the best balance I have achieved so far.
Some-one in the office has just looked over my shoulder and said, "can't you just tint the windows a bit more?"... I may play with that idea :)
Have you tried to add an environment? After adding one try to play with the settings (Hi Lux = no shadow, low Lux is only shadow) a little (works good in combination with fast preview).
I should try to add this environment (with visible to camera and reflections off).
Regards Louis
Ha ah! never thought about adding an environment.
The only problem is the purpose of these renders are to embed it within another image - so really an environment is not wanted. [See image below]
So I have been rendering the image from microstation with no background and saving is to a .psd [photoshop] file with a transparent background to butcher together some neat visualisation images.
I don't agree :-),
Can you try to add the background image as environment (indirect light). I think the feeling of the boat will less cgi.
Hmmm looks like your right :)
never knew you could have an environment to affect light without using it 'visibly' thanks for the tip.
So this is with an environment used indirectly not visible to the camera with a lux value of 750, the shadows back to black a spread angle of 1 [I think I may up this alittle to soften the shadows just a touch] I've gone back to using exterior good as that was a little quicker than interior good. Results are getting better [imo].
Thanks for the help folks - [If anyone has any more suggestions, please feel free to chip in...]
[Oh yeah and a few more twiddly detail bits have been added - can you see them all :) ....]
Another addition that I think always helps is an occlusion procedural. For instance where the superstructure meets the deck the 'dirt' look of occlusion adds more realism. Try adding this procedural to the diffuse map and set to type reflection. Tone down the bias and gain to add subtlety.
Also the hull would be toned somewhat by the ocean colour- particularly that white stripe- there used to be a great option in the old ray-trace days to add some ground reflection (and this is now an option in modo so we should see it coming to a future version of MS).
It seems to be falling out of favour nowadays but sky dome lighting is still useful and will add a bit of dirty shadow as well as illuminating the dark shadows- if the blue overcast of the physically based color type is too much it can be swapped to user defined and a more subtle tone added. Another reason I still like sky dome is that it works with the view display style to illuminate the shadows so they do not appear black