I want to share a few tips for rendering architectural interior scenes with mental ray, using the mr Physical Sky and portal lights. These are some fairly specific tips that will hopefully allow you to achieve a smooth indirect illumination solution as well as control the intensity of the sun and other contributing lights.
I’m not going to start from the absolute beginning here. To get the most from these tips you should already be familiar with the basic fundamentals like how to add a daylight system to your scene, enable the photon target option on the mrSun, enable global illumination, etc.. If you’re not, then you’ll need to spend some “quality time” with the 3ds Max documentation/tutorials. With that out of the way, I’ll dive right in.
I’m going to use the Evermotion bathroom scene that shipped with 3ds Max a version or two back. At the end of this article I’ll post a link to my completed .max file for further reference.
I started by stripping any lights from the scene, hiding the window glass, and applying a single material to everything. That’s primarily so I can focus on the lighting tips for this article.
I then created a daylight system and let it assign the mr Physical Sky to the scene environment and assign the mr Photographic Exposure control.
I then edited the daylight system to remove the mr skylight. It’s not needed since I’m going to place portal lights at the windows. You can click the screen capture to view a larger version if needed.
From that point I added four portal lights to the windows (set to use the environment, not skylight since I don’t have one in the scene) and enabled GI (Global Illumination) & FG (Final Gather) and fired off a test render:
Notice the large spots/circles? You may want to spend time tweaking the GI settings or the mr Sun settings to try and remove these but that’s not the actual problem here. I’ll disable the mrSun and render again to show that it’s not related to that light source:
As you can see, the spots are still there even though the mr Sun is disabled. The reason I’m not getting a smooth GI solution here is actually due to the mr Physical Sky of all things. Notice all the white spots where the direct sunlight should be? That’s from the visible sun disk in the mr Physical Sky and picked up by the portal lights & FG. I prefer to remove that because if you don’t you’ll need a lot of sample to clear that noise, plus it of course adds to the direct sun light which can often become too hot/over-exposed.
NOTE: I believe that it’s also mentioned in the 3ds Max documentation that the mrSun shouldn’t be behind the portal lights. I assume for this reason or something similar. So hopefully this adjustment will allow you to place the sun wherever you want/need and still prevent these lighting artifacts.
To “fix” this problem I’ll instance copy the mr Physical Sky shader from the scene environment to the material editor to make adjustments. Here’s what the default sky looks like:
I will adjust the Disk Intensity and Glow Intensity values to 0.0 and decrease the sun disk scale from 4.0 to 1.0, although that doesn’t really matter when the disk & glow values are set to 0.0. The adjusted sky looks like this:
Now the super bright sun disk is no longer there. It’s now just a nice soft gradient that will play much nicer with your photons (GI) and/or final gather options.
I’m now ready to render again after making this simple change to the mr Physical Sky, and nothing else:
Yaay! No more big white circles/spots/etc…just some more easily fixed blotches due to the low quality FG settings I used in this test. So with that resolved I will now enable the mrSun, increase the FG preset to medium, increase the anti-aliasing (min:1 / max:16) and render again:
Not bad. It’s missing a small detail though, and that’s photons from the mrSun. Notice how cool feeling the image is? During my tests I prevented the mrSun from generating GI photons therefore I’m not getting any warm colored photons from the sun in this scene. Some may actually prefer this look since the sun photons are typically a lot stronger and can overpower a scene unless you manually edit it’s values. Here it is with the sun photons enabled (and adjusted, more info on that below):
It’s a bit warmer and brighter with those photons from the mrSun. In case you’re not sure how to disable photon generation on a light, here’s some captures to help explain that:
With the mrSun/daylight system selected, scroll down to the mental ray Indirect Illumination rollout. By default it’s configured to emit photons when GI is enabled via the “Automatically Calculate Energy and Photons” option. Uncheck that option and also leave the Manual Settings disabled and no photons will be emitted from the light source, in this case the mrSun.
Also make note that I have decrease the multiplier on the mrSun from the default value of 1.0 to 0.2. I did this because at the default value it often seems like the mrSun is just too strong (IMHO). It is quite powerful on the indirect illumination side of things as well and that’s why I have also decreased the GI Global Multipliers on the mrSun (also located in the mental ray Indirect Illumination rollout of the mrSun). I decreased the energy to 0.5 and the photon multipliers to 0.25.
If you don’t do this edit to the mrSun photon energy then the mrSun will generate most of the photons in the scene, unless you specify a number of photons in the manual settings. I know this may be somewhat confusing, that’s why I’m providing the scene file at the end of this article. I discuss it further in some of the gnomon videos I made a while back. But basically if you’ll open the mental ray message window and follow the information it generates as it prepares the scene you’ll discover how brighter light sources generate more photons than less bright light sources (as to be expected). However, I would usually prefer to modify that behavior a bit to achieve more even light distribution in my scenes. At the cost of physical accuracy I suppose…but hey, it’s all about getting the desired look no?
While I’m discussing all this, let me address another frequently asked question. Why do I have so much blue in my scenes? Simple answer, it’s because the sky is blue. The portal lights are picking up their color from the sky and the sky is blue in this case. What if I wanted less blue? Easy. There are controls on the mr Physical Sky for this. Just uncheck the “Inherit from mr Sky” option on the mr Physical Sky so that you can edit it’s settings.
In the Non-Physical Tuning parameters, decrease the saturation level as desired to reduce the intensity of the blue in the sky. You can also try tuning the kelvin values on the mr Physical Exposure control, but that affects the entire image which may not be desired. This only affects the sky itself and thus the color of the light produced by the portal lights.
Less blue as you can see…a little to flat for my taste so I increased the saturation to something like .35 for the final image:
I know that’s a lot to cover in a blog post, so HERE’s the file that you can download and explore. Sorry, I can only save back to 3ds Max 2010 format.
UPDATE: Here’s an OBJ version of the scene for those not using 3ds Max.
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I have been struggling with the mr Sun & Sky for years now. This post is a tremendous help. As always; thanks a lot, Jeff.
Great tut great site. Would like to try this one out.
Jeff would really great if you could save as obj to. For the “other” mental ray app users
“would really great if you could save as obj to. For the “other” mental ray app users” – Done. Updated to include a OBJ file.
Thank You again Jeff!
Nice one Jeff! Good to see you didn’t abandon us, MR users, in favor of iRay
I know, I know, each one has a place in your workflow – I just missed your MR tuts!
Cheers!
I dopn’t understand why you would use the portal’s environment function rather than just using the existing skylight. What is gained by this in terms of quality/speed?
Lots of great info though…
“why you would use the portal’s environment function rather than just using the existing skylight.”
1. Portal lights push light into areas more efficiently than just a skylight + FG would.,
2. Portal lights provide direct light (skylight + FG doesn’t).
3. Portal lights emit photons whereas the skylight + FG combo does not.
There may be more reasons outlined in the documentation on portal lights so be sure to check there as well.
Very good job… I am more into V-ray lately even if i still am better and feel more confy with mental ray… anyway
just one note about the render i hate how the top corner get that fake brightness I end up very often with the same thing and finally darken it up in Photoshop
any particular advice for it?
I haven’t really noticed any issues with the ceilings. The ceiling in this scene seems to look fairly normal to me.
It seems a bit brighter than it should be to me also. there is too much lighting difference between the ceiling and the wall. Maybe it’s accurate (which i humbly doubt), but doesn’t feel that way. Though slightly, there should be a dimming where the ceiling and the wall meets, provoked by the wall itself occluding that part of the ceiling. What do you think?
Check the model itself (it’s posted at the end of the article) as that may be the reason the ceiling looks odd to some. The part of the ceiling that is visible in this render doesn’t touch the wall itself, it’s a small inset box extruded down into the room. The part of the ceiling that touches the wall, is not visible at this angle due to this inset ceiling box thing. If there were a more typical flat ceiling in the scene then you would be able to see where the ceiling touches the walls, shadows, etc..
Oh, ok, it’s like a inwards molding (i dont know its technnical name), ok, now it makes sense, sorry Jeff.
Wow, this is great, thanks!
However, you seem to be changing a lot of the default settings for the mental ray related components. I thought the whole idea with mental ray was that you would get photo realism straight out of the box. That’s always how Autodesk makes it sound in there promo videos, especially for iray. But you are changing a lot; multipliers both here and there. Doesn’t that take your rendering further and further away from being physically accurate? Master Zap doesn’t seem to do so quite as much. Is it just to your own artistic style you choose these settings or do you find them the best way to get a more generic photorealistic rendering workflow?
Cheers for your blog!
“you seem to be changing a lot of the default settings for the mental ray related components. I thought the whole idea with mental ray was that you would get photo realism straight out of the box. That’s always how Autodesk makes it sound in there promo videos, especially for iray.” - With iray it’s a lot easier as you describe (less to adjust), but not with mental ray. Sure, working with mental ray today is a lot easier than it was a couple of years ago, but in order to get the most out of mental ray I feel sometimes (depends on the type of scene) users still need to spend time fine-tuning mental ray settings.
That being said, it is of course just my opinion and anyone reading this should take that into consideration and run their own tests to find whatever workflow (and render engine) that works best for them.
Hi Jeff, and thanks for these great info. that’s really helpful!
I’m not sure it’s related but I think that’s why we should use right hdri file as environment map. actually I have few hdri that don’t incommode me when I try to use those with daylight system (mr sun & skylight enabled). but as a question in your case that’s an interior scene is it not easier to disable mr physical map and just using a light blue/or white color (maybe better than light blue) as environment and tweaking internal Non-Physical Tuning for final tuning? (mr sun & mr sky enabled). in this way those two parameters are ignored and we have a nice overexposed white windows. What is your opinion?
“in your case that’s an interior scene is it not easier to disable mr physical map and just using a light blue/or white color (maybe better than light blue) as environment and tweaking internal Non-Physical Tuning for final tuning? (mr sun & mr sky enabled).” – I can’t imagine why using a gradient would be better or easier than the physical sky. That being said, to each his own. If you get better results with gradient maps over the physical sky then you should keep using that method. You may also want to consider writing a tutorial to share your method with others.
thanks sir – I didn’t mean we have to use a gradient map or something like that, I meant we could use a white tint or maybe a very light blue tint as environment. IMHO when we are defining a high contrast environment or light(s) (for example default values of Disk&Glow Intensity of mr physical sky or those nasty hdri files!) or when we are seeking a deep, high contrast image (for example by tweaking mr photographic exposure control settings) we’ll probably have a terrible GI/FG solution. but by defining a simple neutral tint we could have a smooth results handily. I uploaded few tests here, I’ve used your method but didn’t disable mr sky, didn’t use mr physical sky and used a white tint instead and for final render I’ve changed Non-Physical Tuning of mr sun&sky and even mr sky multiplier (=3). need your opinion!
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/528/48187781.jpg/
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/148/86035355.jpg/
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/513/13mins.jpg/
I don’t know dude, that almost seems like taking a step backwards. A few years ago before we had the physical sky options that almost every application has these days we mainly lit scenes as you describe. It works…and got us all by for years. These days though we do have the nice physical sky ‘gradient’ that we can use to get accurate lighting, so I just figure it’s probably a good idea to use that for the realism. However, as with most anything in rendering, it’s all up to the end users to figure out what gives them the best results and/or the end result that best suits their clients. IMHO there’s nothing wrong with using a neutral color sky/skylight as you outlined, especially if it delivers the look you and/or your client likes.
If you’re concerned about having a high contrasting image outside the windows affecting the lighting, then you could also use the environment background switcher to define one environment for lighting and one for visibility outside the windows. As I’m sure you’re already aware, there are lot’s of options for lighting and I don’t think there’s a single ‘right’ way because everyone has their own preferences, desired look, etc..
thanks a lot Jeff for your answer and attention.
hi Jeff, thanks for the great article.
i have one question for you if that’s ok. please could you show us exactly how you position you portal lights relative to the window frames?
i usually position them just outside of the windows, but often find the frames get a bit burnt out. if i reduce the intesity of the portal to counter this then its benefit to the overall scene is also reduced.
thanks!
The portal lights are placed just outside the window frames (almost touching) and sized slightly smaller than the window frames. The physical sky tips outlined in the article should help with the brightness as it will eliminate the ‘double’ lighting that happens from the sun disk option. If ti’s still too bright then it could be your exposure settings, GI/FG intensity values, etc..
Any chance to make one of this for Vray Render? I Love it!
I don’t know if I should do that. I could try, but I don’t know how useful it would be. I say that because I rarely work on architectural scenes so I’m afraid my workflow for an architectural scene with vray may not be as optimal as someone that does this more frequently. Hmmm…I think I’ll try it just to see what I come up with, but then contact someone like Peter Guthrie or other great VRay artists to come by and critique the settings and offer input/advice on the settings.
Interesting tutorial. I always liked MR better than vray since it doesn’t cost a 1000 extra. Could you please mention 3 very important factors here? The time, image resolution and system config with which you rendered the image. Thanks
“Could you please mention 3 very important factors here? The time, image resolution and system config with which you rendered the image.” – I didn’t keep track of the render time as I wasn’t concerned with that aspect for this particular blog topic. However, I did provide the .max file at the end of the article so people can get all that info and more from it if they desire. Which would be better anyway since it would be based on their hardware, not mine…which CPU wise is feeling rather outdated at this point.
Wow tears on my eyes wonderful tip and method of explaining.
Excelente amigo, muito obrigado pelas dicas e parabéns pelo trabalho.
Abraços.
the corner of the cieling cant’ be that bright compared to the side wall the light is leaking in
corner are “usually” darker due to Ambient Occlusion in real life and this look like shining and is opposite of where the light enter…
and tend to fade darker the further u go from the corner it should be the opposite i guess
maybe i am wrong but to my personal perception the way the cieling is lightned feels strange
Right…I understand it may look odd, until you actually open the scene and look at the ceiling. As I mentioned in a previous reply there are two ceilings in this scene. The one you see at this angle is a lowered block that is inset about a foot from the walls and lowered into the room. It’s clearly visible in the scene. However, if for some reason you’re unable to open the scene or OBJ file I provided in the article, here’s a screen capture to help explain this.
Screen Grab of Ceilings
And here’s the scene rendered with iray, mental ray, and vray to show they all look similar.
Scene rendered with multiple engines.
Again, I know it may look odd because it’s bright where you’d expect to see the ceiling meet the walls, I’m not disputing that. It is a bit misleading for sure. All I’m saying is that it’s not an illumination issue. The illumination is accurate to the model because the ceiling block that you see in this render does not physically touch the walls. The part of the ceiling that does connect to the wall is hidden from the camera, above and behind this lowered ceiling detail/object. Therefore there is no physical way to have a contact shadow to this lowered ceiling part since it doesn’t touch the walls at all.
Uhm… I don’t know if this “issue” has been resolved or desragarded, but in any case… The most common reason for this “brightning” effect is caused by the photon solution. Too high sampling radius will cause the overbright photons hitting the outside of the model to be sampled on the inside, resulting in weird looking cieling and/or walls…
To resolve this, you would have to enable & lower the sampling radius in your photon solution, eg. somewhere around the thickness of the walls, depending of the brightness of the sun.
Of course this would then lead to a need for increasing the amount of photons to get the same smooth result as before.
I don’t know if that’s the cause in this case, but I find it very, very important to be aware of this issue.
Thanks Master~
Awesome! I never made an interior using Mental-Ray, just with V-Ray, but these tips will help me to skip hours of testing
thank you alot!
Tomas
Hey Jeff,
I wrote this question above, just bellow Bryans question…
I think his question was why not to leave the skylight in the scene and keep the usual configuration of the sky portal (picking color from the skylight) instead of deactivating the skylight and picking the color from the environment! On your previous tutorials you were not changing this and there where no issues happening..it was not necessary to tweak the mr physical shader..so what would be the advantage of picking color directly from the environment after all?
Thank you very much for the attention!
Ah, I see. I should probably file this one under epic fail on my part for not explaining the point(s) better.
Yes, I believe if you leave the portal at their default setting using the existing skylight AND use the mrSky then there should be no problem with splotches from the sun disk as it’s not calculated in the mrSky. So that works as expected for illuminating scenes.
So what’s the point of this article? One reason behind this blog article was based on a discussion I had with someone who was using the environment and not the mrSky. They were using HDRs that had a fair amount of contrast that created splotches like this. After explaining how they can blur the HDRs to help clear the spots the question came up about this being related to only HDRs. I explained how it could occur with any high contrast source, even the mrPhysical Sky and then setup an example similar to this scene to illustrate that. I should have showed this by setting up an HDR scene (or explain it) but I thought I’d try to keep it brief and just “skip to the end” and show it with the mr Physical Sky.
So that was one aspect behind this blog article. I also thought I’d throw in a little blurb about how the mrSun seems a bit too powerful to me (just an opinion) and how I’d adjust the photon energy and multipliers to tweak that.
Then to top it all off I had the bright idea of combining all this info with an explanation on removing the blue sky light effect since I see that one come up so often.
So, epic fail on my part for making such a confusing blog article. To be clear, this was only meant to be some tips that may help in some situations…and apparently they don’t fit together as well here as they did in my mind at the time of writing this mess.
I guess in summary, the point(s) I should clarify here are:
1. If a user happens to use the mrPhysical Sky in this manner, or really any high contrast HDR this could lead to splotches/artifacts. Try to remove those high contrast elements for smoother indirect illumination.
2. If the mrSun seems too strong, it can be adjusted as well as it’s photon contribution to the scene.
3. A user can adjust the saturation/color of the mrsky and/or the mr Physical Sky (whichever is used for lighting) to remove the blue cast from it.
Hey Jeff! Thanks for clarifying, now I got the point! For sure this will be handy in many situations! Thank you once more for a great tutorial!!
Hi jeff.
This is Nice tut..
I learn lot from this specially about the issue small and big Spot..
now i better understand…:)
each and every step u mention here…:)
very useful..
Hi Jeff
this tutorial is absolutly fantastic. the tip about the sun disk was the most valuable for me as i have always abandoned GI because of the hot spots, i cant wait to give it a try on my next job.
BTW, will you be at AU 2011?
Great post and helpfull. Thank you!
How did I miss this topic before, very timely. Get work as always!
Hi Jeff how are you doing, hope all is well, its great tutorial but I think its not for beginners :p. Are you in a forum? I really miss the vizdepot days you know, ttyl
Hey my friend! Doing well, hope you are too. Like you mentioned I also miss the vizdepot. Here lately I’ve been hanging around the AREA site and CGarchitect a bit more than I used to. I would imagine that most of the vizdepot folks would migrate over to CGarchitect.
On this tutorial, yes it was geared towards those that already have a good working knowledge of mental ray in 3ds Max.
Greetings from Srilanka,
I am a self learner of this wonderful program.
I’ve learned a lot from this tut.
Thanks Jeff
thanks Jeff
hey Jeff thanks for such a wonderful tips on mental ray
I have basic scene setup with few objects using mr Physical Sky and daylight system.
I have an issue on mr physical sky env map that when I render single frame the env. map (mr Physical Sky) map appear in that frame but in the batch render it will not. It will always be black or transparent. Any solution please.
Thanks
I haven’t encountered that one. Sounds like a bug, assuming there are not configuration problems with the scene. I guess I would manually fire off a test render from each camera (assuming you’re using batch render for multiple camera angles). If each render looks normal yet the batch render option screws it up, then submit a defect report to Autodesk & send a stripped version of the file to them to help explain the issue.
Thanks.
Is it possible to exclude an object from the effects of lighting from a daylight system while using the MR renderer?
There’s no simple option that I’m aware of that will allow object exclusion from the daylight system.
Thanks a lot
any other solution for it?
coz it will take too longer to render.
thanks again
“any other solution for it? coz it will take too longer to render.” – The daylight system itself shouldn’t add much to your render times therefore excluding an object from it wouldn’t really be that beneficial. You should look into things like final gather settings and material & anti-aliasing sample settings, displacement, BSP values, etc..to find areas where optimizing settings will pay off.
That being said, if you still believe that excluding objects from the daylight system will solve the render time issues in your scene then you could go into the object properties of an object and exclude it from the FG calculation since the mrSky isn’t a source of direct light anyway. Naturally that will exclude the object from ALL indirect illumination so that may or may not be an unwanted side effect.
You can also control the FG quality for local materials in the A&D material settings. So you could dial down FG quality/time per material. Beyond that I think you’ll just have to manually render the bits & pieces that you want to exclude.
Thanks a lotttttttttttttttt.
It works…
Backburner Problem?
I have scene setup with several objects with camera animation.
I am using FG and GI as indirect lighting. My FG and GI maps (already rendered after each 3 Frames). For single machine with my FG
and GI maps everything is alright. But with the same maps I am rendering with Backburner (multiple machines) there are some
gamma and flickering issues appear within render frames. What’s the problem actual is? any solution Please.
Thanks again.
hi jeff , great post man , i believe when disabling skylight there would be no longer the need of changing the physical scale to unitless and pointing it to 90000 for example?
Depends on the scene configuration and it’s exposure settings.
Hi Jeff,
I’m using 3ds max 2012 with mental ray. Configuration are i7 with 16GB of ram.
I just gonna render my first walk-through animation. Video’s output size are 720p but have some technical query related Render Settings.
I have several scenes with some of up-to 1GB scene size. Render settings of the scene:
(Anti-aliasing sampling quality min-1 max-16,)
(Filter type- Mitchell)
(Bucket width – 28)
(Raytrace Acceleration method – BSP2)
For single frame it’ll take 30-40 minutes to render with pre-build generated FG maps. Is it okay or What render settings you prefer for?
HOW DO I OPTIMIZE RENDER TIME?
thanks a lot
Best regards,
vikrant.
“HOW DO I OPTIMIZE RENDER TIME?” – Depends on the scene. Lot’s of glossy reflections will kill your mental ray render times. High samples from lights will also have a big impact on your mental ray render times. You may want to refer to some of Ramy Hanna’s posts like THIS and THIS. He may have more up to date info on best practices for rendering architectural interiors with mental ray then me.
Thanks a lot Jeff
As always your help me lot for improve myself.
and Ramy Hanna’s tips help me lot for basic render understanding.
thanks both of you.
hi im newer here, im using 3ds max design sp 2009. i can’t open the 3d max file. is 3ds max design sp 2009 cannot open 3ds max file? i really want to learn all about 3ds max. can u tutor me?? i have a problem here, when i rendering my object the object seems not clear there are noises at some place. is it because graphic card? because my PC don’t have graphic card..
) i do really2 want to know plz help me out…
“i can’t open the 3d max file. is 3ds max design sp 2009 cannot open 3ds max file?” – Correct. 2009 can’t open a 2010 or newer 3ds Max file.
“i really want to learn all about 3ds max. can u tutor me??” – I would recommend starting out with the tutorials that ship with 3ds Max (F1 key). They will give you a good base knowledge of 3ds Max to build upon. Once the fundamentals are covered then dig into sites like youtube (because it’s free), digital tutors (not free, but good content), Gnomon, and many more.
“my object the object seems not clear there are noises at some place. is it because graphic card?” - The graphics card doesn’t affect your render unless you’re using a GPU based rendering application like iray, vray r/t, Octane, or Arion. Most of the time grain (with mental ray) comes from low samples on area light sources and/or users not increasing material glossy samples as needed.
thanks a lot jeff
Hi Jeff,
Good done nowdays (cgphd.com interview) … Good Luck
How do I unhide mentalRay Blackbody shader within 3ds max 2012 64 bit.
Thanks
vikrant.
Just use the Kelvin Temperature Color shader. It’s basically the same thing and available by default without the need to unhide/edit anything.
great thanks.
why you are using Physical Scale to Unitless instead of using Physical Units? And also change the White point to 100 kelvin? Please let us know the idea of using that method? Thank you.
“why you are using Physical Scale to Unitless instead of using Physical Units?” – Just personal preference.
“And also change the White point to 100 kelvin? Please let us know the idea of using that method?” – It’s explained HERE. NOTE: This hue issue has been resolved in 3ds Max 2013 and using this kelvin value hack in 3ds Max 2013 will produce horrible results.
Thanks a lot…. for sharing the great tips.
Hey jeff am in need of to take print out my exterior view in banner, size is about 6×7 feet any idea about that, because if i use that value in 3ds max it is showing error please help me very urgent. please…………………
Find out what DPI value you need/want to use and then use the print size wizard in 3ds Max. For example, I bet 150 DPI would be plenty for such a large image. With that in mind the print size wizard calculated: 72″ x 84″ print size times 150 DPI = 10800 x 12600 pixels for your render size. If that’s still too large for your workstation/RAM to mange then you’ll have to either reduce DPI/output size or split render/etc.
Thanks a lot jeff…………………. I have another issue, i fixed indirect illumination fg and gi correctly and perfectly but when it renders everything becomes white…… Have you came acroos this problem can you please help me out about this issue.Am using 3ds max 2012
Not a lot of info to go on, but I suppose an all white render sounds like it’s just overexposed.
thanks jeff . . . you dont use skylight ! can i ask Why?
The scene uses portal lights which are more efficient at lighting a scene like this than a skylight.
i need very urgent help jeff, shall i upload my file to you will you please help very urgent please please please, my problem is even though i adjust the physical sky settings as told before, white spot circles is still in my scene please help me. Can you please provide me your link to upload or email id like that please help me………
Hi jeff am rendering an interior scene in that scene out of four walls two walls are colored white and rest two are colored some kind of green shade my problem is while rendering my whole scene looking greenish due to global illumination but when i omitted gi scene not looking smoother so what i have to do look correctly as it is in scene.
I’m not gay… but i love you!!!! : )
Many thanks to have the time and patience to share this with us. It is very helpful for me as i’m learning how to illuminate better.
Thanks a lot again! You are great!
All the best
A
hi mate,
when u die i want to pickle your brain and hope i can still retrieve your knowledge and generosity.
Thank you again for your time and effort, it has been immencely appreciated
cheers
make it with texture. when i apply texture spots remain .
still i am getting stuck with spots when i apply texture so make it with texture. and would request you to setup night lighting in this scene.
Jeff,
I just noticed something strange. I revisited the evermotion model recently and in Max 2013 the entire scene has and materials are blue… To make sure I wasn’t going crazy I opened the file in 2011 and rendered it, then opened it in 2013 and rendered it. Here are the results, do you know what could be causing this?
2011:
[IMG]http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v126/ApexScalpel/Bathroom3DS2011.jpg[/IMG]
2013:
[IMG]http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v126/ApexScalpel/Bathroom3DS2013.jpg[/IMG]
Ahh, whitepoint is at 100… Kindly disregard.
“Ahh, whitepoint is at 100…” – Exactly. In 3ds Max 2013 they fixed the greenish/blue hue issue I harped about for a couple of years. So now if you use the trick I described in that earlier post about setting it to 100, you’ll get 100.
Hi Jeff
Thanks a mil for everything…I don’t know if you realise how much it helps us!!
Just one question seemingly unrelated, but since we’re on the subject of the daylight system:
How would you simulate a shadow using MR Sky to create an effect, for example, of light shining through leaves or a cloudy day?? As with the photometric light ‘Projector Map’ option. I am so used to Mr Sky and would love to have that option.
Am I just missing something?
Hope that makes sense!
Thanks again for all the help.
See THIS post for one method of using volume light with the daylight system (using a separate volume only light). If you use the volume light effect and it renders black then it’s because of your exposure control settings. Refer to my mental ray FAQ for more info on that (#18).
You could also use a projector map or the parti-volume shader. Search around at mrmaterials.com for my tutorial on a projector map (volume caustics) setup and some topics on the parti-volume shader. Typically the parti-volume will produce a bit more volume depth than the volume light effect, but it was usually slower to render as well. I haven’t tried it with unified sampling to see if that helps the render times, so you may want to investigate that as well.
Hey
wanted to drop a line, this thread has definately put me on the right tractk with my interiors.
started a fun little test thread.
http://forums.3dtotal.com/showthread.php?p=922602#post922602
Wanted to say thank you Jeff for being a inspiration.
hey jeff u didn’t notice i asked you eariler and now i am asking again that when i use day light with mr portals , i see spots on floor (mostly when i use wood floor ) , i am getting nice render but only have single problem ,,,, can you fix it
i use day light. on window mr portals . gamma 2.2 , FG and GI on, and change setting of mr physical sky value jst like sun disk 1 or 0 .
plz plz………….plz………plz……………….. help me
The spots could be reflections of something or noisy because of very low sampling or it could be light grain due to low samples or it could be low interpolation settings if you’re using interpolation. Too many factors to guess at. If it’s noise/grain then perhaps my “Identifying Noise” video tutorial HERE may help you determine what can cause those type of issues.
Tip: If the spots are square, then you’re using intepolated glossy reflections/refractions and you need to adjust those settings. If they are grainy reflections then it’s probably low glossy samples on the material or a visible area light has specular enabled. You’ll need to adjust the glossy samples on the material and/or disable specular on the area light and/or disable the specular contribution on the material, etc..
Bottom line, it’s difficult to say without actually seeing the image. If you’ve posted your render on a forum/site somewhere then provide a link to it and I’ll be able to provide a better guesstimate.
That’s interesting that you mentioned you hid glass objects. I was just today trying to work out how to exclude materials from Material Override in Mental Ray – and ended up just hiding the glass (not ideal, but ok). I am however tempted to revert back to V-Ray, which I am used to, so I can get features which I am missing and not being able to find alternatives in Mental Ray that satisfies me.
Hey Jeff
thanks this was really helpful.
but i got another problem, when i made my resolution higher 2000×2000, I seem to be getting the circles again, but none when its lower1000x1000. Also sunlight position also seem to be off when i changed the resolution. Do you know why that happens?
thanks
Afraid I haven’t heard of that one before. I can’t imagine why the light position would change when uniformly increasing the resolution or why it would cause photon issues, etc..
Hi jeff, Am using 3ds max 2010 i want to control the color bleeding when am using gi and fg. In short i explain my scene a room with an window using daylight with an merely red tinted wooden floor. Because of that floor my whole scene getting red tint. My client needs that flooring image so i cant escape from that too. I googled about it and i got that we can control by applying, using photon map in mental ray connection in photon which is locked. Please help me please please please please very big client i dont want to loose him. I well know that we can able to control this using color override/ray trace switcher in 3ds max 2012. Please help me jeff please please……
“using photon map in mental ray connection in photon which is locked” – Just click the little lock icon to unlock it. THIS (Managing color bleed) may also be helpful.
Jeff, That video is only a sample. Please tell me how to mange that color bleed. Please ………big fan…
Jeff, I unlocked it and i applied photon map but it is not giving the right output its like glowing that is what am trying to say in previous question.
plz….
Jeff, Thanks man i found the solution by unhiding the word called raytrace switcher in production_max.mi, and i applied the texture in eye rays and i changed the final gather color to white. I red about this in one of your blog thanks again man i hope.
Jeff, Now i had another issue in that room i placed two mirrors, facing opposite to each other but in that reflection i found shadows casting wrongly not like physical world but i overcome it somewhat through adjusting the interpolation but i cant able to get neatly.
Jeff, I had one question for you. That is we all know final gather is shooting points, completely camera view or view based one. If we change the camera position or view position again we have to recalculate the final gather. Was there any way in max that is shooting fg points on entire scene after that we can change the view render it without recalculating the fg`s? Do GI working like fg or one time calculation is enough for GI(because of photon based one)? I know sounds silly but eager to know about it.
If I remember correctly some people would use a camera lens shader (wrap lume I think was the name) to calculate the FG on the whole image in one shot. It’s been years since I tried that though, so I could be remembering that incorrectly. I also remember that I used to pre-calculate it using a wide angle lens and at certain points in my scenes where it was needed. I would imagine the interpolation methods available today should make all of this easier though.
Jeff, Do you know any tutorials for architectural fly over animation s, regarding camera movements or interior and exterior animations?
Thanks for this, Jeff.
(and for the videos too)
I am using all of your same settings for a scene of mine, but I get a bunch of noise… Why would that be?
Could be area light or portal light grain or glossy material grain. Both require higher samples (area light samples or material samples) to clear.
I am a big fanatic of Mental Ray. Just want to thank you for sharing tips to us. Kudos!
Thank you great tutorial…..by the way how did you fold your towels like that? They look so neat and perfect….