need some setting and lighting help

[maple syrup]

hello everyone, first time poster here. to start off my images never seem to get clear. A lot of fire flies and the images are just grainy. for example the first image i attached took a while to render but i have a little out dated machine, but the sample per pixel were 1130 and i was well over 480000 samples. I was rendering with indigo v2.2 and using sketch up pro. The settings were bidirectional MLT because this was an interior shot and normal MLT was not producing anything visible. My rig froze/crashed and i was unable to record all the final settings but i believe i had to turn the tone mapping to reinhard because camera was not producing an image.



Something i have noticed is that my light bulbs really do not emit light. i have figured out the light part i think but if i duplicate that bulb it doesnt seem to work. as in the image the lights hanging are not really emitting any light but are just white but i might be wrong and cannot tell. So i read that i should put the lights on different layers/light layers and that didnt work. My second image cooked for 2 days and had 9500 samples per pixel and it never cleared up. i have tried changing 90% of the settings and have tired different scenes with no improvement.



This image just would not clear up and i think it has to do with the light bulbs but I’m not sure. i have trolled the forums and have not really found anything to help me with my problem i have not had to many other problems with images and have baked out some nice ones over night but my interior shots never seem to work. If anyone could give me some advice on this matter that would be great. if you need me to upload my sketch up files or my .igs files I could so.

[ior]

Hi.

I think that there is nothing wrong with your lights, they are emitting as can be seen on shadows. Try to put more power on the emitters so you can use linear tone mapping (increase a certain percentage in every emitter).


I think the problem is just too many reflective materials in your scene (like the walls). try to use the minimum reflective materials that you can.

Or you can use super sampling>=3 and that will help the spots to disappear, it will just take a while to the scene get illuminated and requires more memory to render the scene, but it will give a smother result. See this thread:
http://www.indigorenderer.com/forum/vie ... 4&start=18


The best way to render reflection is BiDir+MLT.


See also my post and thread regarding reflective materials:
http://www.indigorenderer.com/forum/vie ... 2&start=18
http://www.indigorenderer.com/forum/vie ... 37&t=10142

[Soup]

You have a tonne of white in those scenes - make sure they aren't pure white. Maximum of 80% brightness, or 204,204,204 RGB. Any higher and they will bounce an unrealistic amount of light.
Also, use camera tone mapping to get a good feel for the light levels, if you are using reinhard it will compensate and it will be difficult to tell the difference.

[Godzilla]

What type of environment type are you using in the second image? It looks like sun/sky.. If so - are you using exit portals?

[Pibuz]

Hi Maple.
First of all you have to know that indoor renderings are indeed much longer to render than exterior shots. So you have to be patient, also considering that your machine is a little outdated, as you have said (btw: what are your machine's specs?).

Then, I found that emitters could be the "problem" here. At the moment, Indigo calculates the light sources according to their power, giving each light source a percentage of the total calculation power available. This means that if your environment is black and you have an emitter of 10W (call it A) and another of 100W (call it B), Indigo will give the (B) 10 times the power than it gives to (A), so (A) will clean in MUCH more time.
In your case, your strong emitter is the sun, your weak emitter is the neon light. Try increasing dramatically the power of the neon, separating the layer, so in the GUI you can lower the layer's value to obtain the correct luminosity.

[CTZn]

Since you didn't mention them, be sure to use exit portals for your interiors shots. The matter is discussed in the topic nearby titled "Exit Portal Material doubt ". Exit portals will discard light not passing through them and therefore they ehance the rendering efficiency a lot in such cases where most of the sun light hits the outside walls.

[maple syrup]

Thanks for the advice, i think it was the exit portals which i had no idea existed, but i haven't had a chance to go back to those images just yet but this new one has the exit portals applied and there are a lot less fire flys and I made sure the lights were all on different layers. Over all i think it is coming along nicely. I let this one rendered to about 1500 samples per pixel.



I’m using a duo core 3.2Ghz processor with 4 GB of ram. Unfortunately I’m using a 32 bit system at the moment, so I’m not getting the full memory. Over all this image took just under 15 hours to cook and there is room for improvement.

I use sun/sky for almost all my images, I use sketch up background for night shots and I haven’t figured out environment maps fully yet. I made sure that all whites are 204 or less that white image above for some reason most of that is gray in the model but it rendered it White as snow. I’ll have to adjust the settings on that model some more before it works out.

Thanks for the help guys!

[Headroom]

If you are looking to decrease render times then moving everything to one light layers will help.
You can achieve that by adjusting the gain of the light sources equivalent to what you adjusted the equivalent light layer to.

For more natural looking images choose camera tone mapping instead of the default reinhardt tone mapping. I often use one of the agfa-axp for nice bright pictures. If you still feel your whites are not coming out correctly you can also adjust the white point in the Imaging section. You can use the presets explained well here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_illuminant or you can manually change the x/y parameters.