UK
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Re: Gallery Space
The light intensity is used to add more photo-realism. The blown out light at the windows.
There is a work around, without you changing your settings, or affecting other peoples models, will come back to this after degree work is finished and I have had chance to see how the lighting looks with version 3.
UK
Joined: May 3, 2010
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Re: Gallery Space
Welcome to June everyone!
Produced these renders a few days ago but then waited to post them, didn't want to look like I was trying to take the limelight away from makouillex's gallery post.
Sweet Home 3.2 renders
Imported my "Gallery space" model into Sweet Home 3.2, tried a quick internal (Create photo...) render, to see how things might look before making any lighting changes.
Initial observations, the AO (Ambient Occlusion) levels are quite high, even for midday. If there are no actual black objects in a scene, then no dark areas are rendered anywhere in a scene, producing a flatter none punchy looking rendered image.
Next Added a power setting to the original lights. At which point I realised that any objects I had added a texture to, needed to have the (new to me) objects "Shininess" setting changed. Also, discovered any older light bulbs size is ignored, so all shadows are hard even if the lamp size is large (notice the multiple hard edge shadows next to the wall light).
Then Replaced all lamps (there are lots in the scene), with new versions that work correctly in 3.2, tweaked lamp power settings to reach an almost identical output to my previous renders. Spotted another couple of objects that still required their "Shininess" setting altering.
Finally Needed to added extra light to the gallery window (through the doorway), to try and recreate the blown out photo realistic look of the original renders, a single light on full intensity in 3.2 is not powerful enough to provide enough light to do this.
The extra light also adds a nice reflection on the wooden floor.
Okay I know I am a bit late to the party but...
Main thing I find really problematic with 3.2
The lights disappearing from the 3D preview when not selected. Trying to visually adjust one lights placement in the 3D preview, while comparing it to other adjacent lights is now impossible.
Position a light, then moving virtual position to see that the light is in the correct place, means constantly re-clicking the light to make it re-appear in the 3D preview.
Things I really like about 3.2
Ability to create round walls.
Being able to store viewpoints, a great time saver when moving around within a scene while editing objects, before returning to the render position, very useful, thank you Emmanuel for adding it!
Light bulbs "Keep proportions" being locked.
Fast render speed!
Thank you,
David
Edit: corrected the text size show on renders.
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[Edit 2 times,
last edit by db4tech at Jun 1, 2011, 7:51:07 PM]
France
Joined: Nov 7, 2005
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Re: Gallery Space
Thank you David for your detailed feedback. I'm glad that you succeeded to get a rendering with version 3.2 similar to your version of the Advanced rendering plugin (and faster if I follow you correctly). I know you would prefer light sources that are always shown in the 3D view. If you really want such lights, I (or you) can prepare a furniture library file containing them. Just have to use a 3D model based on lightSource.obj with the g line that doesn't start with sweethome3d_light_source and use a properties file defining the light sources similar to the ones in DefaultFurnitureCatalog.properties (note the new deformable#, texturable# and lightSourceDiameter# properties introduced in version 3).
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Emmanuel Puybaret, Sweet Home 3D creator
UK
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Re: Gallery Space
Hi Emmanuel,
Couldn't reply sooner been unwell for a few days.
Thank you for the information and lightSource.obj.
I had discovered the deformable#, texturable# and lightSourceDiameter# properties and had already added them to the AdvancedRenderingLights that I used in the above 3.2 renders, to help make sure the lights closely matched the previous renders.
One question, if the light object doesn't start with sweethome3d_light_source, won't it then show in the SunFlow render?
As for render times, yes you guessed correctly!
The first "Gallery space" renders (very high resolution) I tried were with a custom AdvancedRendering version, it used twice as many samples (I was aiming for very high quality) and took a massive 51 hours.
Then, after returning the samples back to the previous settings, the render was around 23 hours.
After discovering a bug with SunFlow, that drastically affected indoor render times if sunsky or IBL isn't required, I made a new custom AdvnacedRendering version just for this model with that disabled, which rendered the same scene in 13.5 hours.
I was very pleasantly surprised to find Sweet Home 3.2 rendered the scene in around 5-6 hours, well done!
Have downloaded the source code, look forward to examining the changes you made.
Sorry for my misleading previous message, but great to learn that optimization on the rendering parameters brought you such a faster processing. Did you downscale the image you published here, or is it full scale?
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Emmanuel Puybaret, Sweet Home 3D creator
