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an attempt to break into the Royal ball. The Pathtracing parameter
Until now, there is a strong belief among SH3D fans that it is impossible to get moire soft scattered reflections in the program. They are either clear of different brightness (as in glossy varnish), or absolutely mirrored, or completely absent. Most materials in nature have exactly the average properties of light reflection. And on the surface of such objects, reflections do not have clear boundaries, they are blurred, as in matte varnish. This is the third day I've been sitting and trying to tame the Pathtracing parameter. A difficult case.. It is this parameter in the render settings that is responsible for scattering reflected light. This is not a property of the model, it is a property of the entire render, so all items will be processed according to this principle. I started with sunlight and quickly got the desired effect, but I was interested in artificial light, not sunlight. And there the parameter started acting up and refused to work as I needed. I created a room with the help of boxes, placed two pots with a flower, a mirror ball and a vase with daisies inside. Lighting using three hemispherical towers of different colors. And three spots in the ceiling. I painted the walls with a dark gray color and assigned the maximum Ns128 gloss in the MTL file. to obtain the moire reflection effect, it is the maximum gloss of the material that is needed, if the gloss is less than 128 for Ns, then the effect in the render almost disappears. In the standard settings of the third level, the picture looks like this.// Now let's replace the standard LightingMetod parameter with Pathtracing. In the third level of quality, it begins to act only in conjunction with SILK. In the fourth quality level, it works with both DEFAULT and SILK parameters. It is immediately clear that there will be no easy result. The first images turned out to be disgusting. Very coarse coarse grain everywhere, some broken black and white pixels all over the surface of the picture. Everything is very bad and ugly. I started to explore other options. There are two parameters that help to improve the image. The OtherLens parameter changes the grain size on glossy surfaces. But the rendering time depends very much on it. For example, 0 at the fourth quality level - the rendering time is only 9 minutes!!. And at 10 it is already 1 hour 35 minutes (the effect is very imperceptible, you need to add more, but time also increases immediately).
And there is a second very important parameter on the next line in the settings. It needs to be set only to 2, slightly shift the process, no more. If you set it to 3-9, then the whole picture will be covered with sparkling stars. But at 2 it is even more or less tolerable, and these rare white pixels can be slightly removed with an increased resolution (in the following picture 3000x3000 pixels, everything turns out much smoother and more pleasant, without coarse noise and grain, time 3 hours 10 minutes).
But the most interesting thing is that the fourth level loads much faster than the third!! But at the third level, the smoothest and softest dissolution of reflections is obtained. But there the time grows 3-4 times. But better (I remind you that SILK is needed). 10h30m...
A real royal character, unpredictable and paradoxical, which is very difficult to work with. I tried to apply my discoveries to more complex scenes and was disappointed. For a very long time.. For several days, although the morning viewing of the piece in the center of the picture was very pleasing with a high-quality image. So this royal mode is only suitable for simple scenes in the exterior or more complex ones, but with sunlight, without other light sources. It's a pity, this is the most photorealistic mode, without it it is more difficult to get a very realistic picture. Conclusion. Pathtracing allows you to simulate unpolished metallic metals in the render. When assigning a texture instead of a color, the appearance of reflections changes slightly, they spread out in width. The highest quality reflection with scattering is obtained in sunlight from the side. If you use artificial light and several fixtures, the result strongly depends on the settings and the time can increase very much. Pathtracing settings require constant compromises - quality and time. Sometimes good quality is impossible here without a very long rendering and everything loses its meaning.
Netherlands
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Re: an attempt to break into the Royal ball. The Pathtracing parameter
Great how you explore the different settings to get different results with rendering. Amazing how much difference it can make in the look of materials. YafaRay is not that bad but seeing this I really wish we had a more advanced renderer, if possible one that uses the GPU instead of the CPU.
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Russia
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Re: an attempt to break into the Royal ball. The Pathtracing parameter
in Russia, we have a whole club of fans of the Smena 8m camera, the camera is very simple, the pictures there are unexpectedly all sorts and interesting)) and it attracts with its unpredictability. She is very much loved by the people, among true connoisseurs of art. Working with SH3D reminds me a lot of this camera. I like it)).
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Re: an attempt to break into the Royal ball. The Pathtracing parameter
That's it, we need to finish. My experiments with PATH TRACING rendering parameters ended with conclusions, I specifically made these examples only using models, without applying textures on invisible boxes (it looks like a scene in the interior of a real room, for example) 1. This mode differs from standard modes in that it allows you not to simulate, but to receive in reality scattered reflections and even reflexes from surrounding surfaces. They are poorly controlled, but even in such a stripped-down form they give an advantage. Because even the minimum is better than the absence. For practical work in the interior, this mode is not very applicable, because it depends very much on the loading of the scene with models. Each model dramatically adds time. Lighting doesn't have much effect, it's the weight of the models. To apply this rendering mode, you need to reduce two parameters in the settings and look for optimal combinations of them with each other (with a gradual increase in the red parameter on low-resolution trial renderers. I'm trying for 400). In red, I highlighted the main parameter that affects the graininess of the image. The higher the number of the red parameter, the better the picture. In real work, let's say a maximum of 10 units, and you don't need more. The minimum acceptable grain is on the number 4, preferably more. The red parameter directly depends on the desire to spend your time on rendering. It is enough to put the green parameter on the number 2, you can put it on three. It doesn't make sense further, it affects the smoothing of coarse grain, but adds broken pixels. This is a secondary parameter, the main one is the first one, red. All other parameters are of little importance. When working with PATHTRACING mode, you need to find a balance between the numbers of red and green parameters and the resolution in pixels. The best quality at a resolution of 2000 and above. 3000 pixels is optimal. The quality level 4 is best suited for processing mirror surfaces. It is universal for this mode. The third level requires high pixel resolution several times longer to render. As a result, I'm going to use this mode only in a limited way, it's not suitable at all for complex interior scenes. But if the interior has light-weight models, then it is applicable, only light models are usually primitive, for which this royal parameter is too royal. Everywhere you need to look for the meaning and necessity of application. There is a maximum number of heavy weight models in this scene. I have selected the maximum parameters as in the screenshot. With them, the picture in a resolution of 2000x2000 pixels was loaded for 7 hours. The previous images are lighter in terms of models and were uploaded for 2-4 hours in the best resolution (3000-4000 pixels)
Netherlands
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Re: an attempt to break into the Royal ball. The Pathtracing parameter
Thank you for sharing the results of your experiments. Not many users have the time, equipment, or patience to do such an extensive investigation. Thank you for sharing this with us! It shows that great renderings are possible with Sweet Home 3D but that it requires finding just the right parameter settings for each scene.
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