Arch-vis experiments

Quickly sharing this before work;

Something i've been working on for a while. Rendered in 2.6+ Yaf[a]ray! Yay!
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Needs lots of work still.

Looking good so far.

I really like the wooden beams, nice texture.

What's your next step with this?

* add more props to fill it in a bit
* finish adding shaders and textures [tile floor is suppose to be near-black tile, but the blend settings I'm using get wiped each time I close blender]
* Work on overall colors (in textures and postpro) to make it look like a pleasant, warm, room somewhere in Italy.
* Render in high-res, and with high photon count.

[edit] and add a pot around the plants in the left foreground.

Ah yes, the plant does need a pot doesn't it?

Look forward to your next update, sound like it's going to be cool.

So since the first image I shared, I have gotten a new computer which is much more conducive to rendering in Cycles which I will try to learn.
Changed the render engine, and this is the first thing that came out of it.
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Took only a minute which is about 30x faster than on my old computer. Yay!

[edit] a few minutes later;
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One thing I can't figure out in Cycles is how to increase the scattered lighting. Notice in the Yaf[a]ray render how everything is nice and bright without being directly lit. Cycles however, while still scattering light, isn't nearly as bright. I already turned up to diffuse "bounce" value in the render settings really high, and that did help, but the effect seems to have plateaued off. Anyone know boost this effect?

[edit] About the above; I'm asking if there's a 'natural' way to do it as if there isn't, I can always fake it the old fashioned way with some behind-the-camera lights.

Didn't realize it had it, but Cycles has an ambient occlusion option with Add-mode blending so that works fine for brightening up a scene.
Excuse the somewhat dark shadows; first time using a color balance node. Didn't realize I dropped the shadows that far.

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Coming along well, I like the brick facade you used. Were those modeled or is that a distortion/normal/bump map effect?

BnBGobo99 wrote:Coming along well, I like the brick facade you used. Were those modeled or is that a distortion/normal/bump map effect?

Thank you. Those were modeled.

Absolutely great work so far. The bricks look great. Not much I can really say needs to be added/changed since you're still working on stuff and nothing is screaming out to me as being terrible.

Looking very nice. I see the plant pot has arrived

Just one question, what happened to the wood texture on the beams? Seems to have gone and I really liked that.

Strangebloke wrote:
Just one question, what happened to the wood texture on the beams? Seems to have gone and I really liked that.

I switched render engines and I hadn't replaced it until now.


Now with 14% more hotspots.
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I was always unhappy with the tiles, so now I went and found a nice proper tile texture. Previously the tiles had been mesh with just a simple color shader.
Various and sundry other details were tweaked as I saw fit. One problem I have at the moment is that I get ZERO caustics behind glass objects. I get them just fine with a default glass object in a new .blend so I must have messed up some settings somewhere.

This is a VERY newbie reply, but how large is your light source? If I remember correctly that can cause some of that.

Xraygunner wrote:This is a VERY newbie reply, but how large is your light source? If I remember correctly that can cause some of that.

You're right, the relative scale of the lightsource does affect caustic sharpness but my light is relatively very small (a good distance away to avoid a soft penumbra). I even tested a temporary point light source right behind the glass, but there's no transmission whatsoever. I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong.

Forgive a very very newbie answer but there is actually a No Caustics check box under the Integrator panel in render settings. You haven't ticked that and forgotten have you?

Also there's something at the bottom of this page about a Clamp setting to help get rid of Fireflys in backlit window scene like yours. If you haven't already tried that it may help
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I have no experience with cycles I'm afraid so can't offer anything more than that.
The wood looks nice again though

little deviation for fun;
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with/without postpro comparison
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StrangeBloke, I did make sure that the No Caustics button was not enabled so it's not that. In my version of Blender though (optimized 2.63 build), I can't find the Clamp setting or even the Integrator panel that I've seen in other versions. Maybe I should try to get a newer build. Thanks for trying.

I'm am quite liking this!
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By the way, I did find the Clamp setting; it was under a different panel in this version.

Working on filling up the scene;
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Looking good. I really like the apples, pity you can hardly see them in the actual render but great level of detail.

Well done on spotting the clamp setting as well. Seems to have helped clear some of the fireflies away.

Looking great, RR. Your "little deviations" were pretty neat as well. I'm excited to spot all the details you put into this when you post the final image.

Strangebloke wrote:
Well done on spotting the clamp setting as well. Seems to have helped clear some of the fireflies away.

It did, completely in fact, though I haven't done a proper rerender yet. Thanks a bunch for pointing that out!
Thanks Mike!

Excellent, look forward to the re-render.

My Googling skills are legendary

Another partial;
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I enabled full GI which is rather unnecessary in this case. The render took way too long so I killed it eventually.

Oh wow that looks superb!

I can well believe that took a long time to render. Have you found any solution for the caustics yet?

Strangebloke wrote:Have you found any solution for the caustics yet?

I haven't. Since I'm getting diffuse scattering, I'm not too worried about the caustics since they'll only be visible behind the milk jars, and the vase so I'll just paint them in in post-pro.
As I said, it works fine in a blank .blend so in the future..

Fair enough, you can spend ages chasing a problem that's only in one blend file.

Good idea to just sort it in post. Keep up the great work.