How to render a carpet and lights (Maxwell plugin for SU)

KatrinK

I'm learning SU and Maxwell therefore would appreciate your help!
I have a some problems when I'm rendering this scene:

I have imported a carpet from 3D Warehouse and I quite like it's pattern.
The carpet wasn't visible in Maxwell so I made it into a face. What properties of the material I should change in Maxwell so that it looks more like a carpet than a flat image?
The chandelier appears to be too bright even though the overall exposure is not bad I suppose. How can I make bell sconces more visible(they are yellowish originally) and chandelier to be more like a chandelier than a bright star on the ceiling?
The scene was rendered at SL20, but there are still a lot of white dots.
Should I make a roughness of all the materials less(walls & panelling)? The window , sconces, bulbs - all use AGS, White panelling is (230, 230, 230). The mirror on the wall is has a texture image in SU and uses Maxwell->Material->Character->Automatic setting. So it shouldn't render it as a mirror for now ( as far as I understand). What can cause white dots appearing all over the place here?

If you can give me any other advice how I can improve the scene and make it more realistic, I'd really appreciate as it's my first trial and I really need to learn a lot!

jason_maranto

Here are some answers:

Add a bump/normal map (normal map preferred) to the material... without MXED there's not much else you can do here.
AGS does not refract light (like glass/water/etc.) so it acts more like a reflective screen than a glass object... I don't think you will ever get a realistic results from AGS in this instance. Its designed purpose is for glazing (windows).

Also it looks like you have an emitter material assigned to the actual chandelier geometry, but I can't be sure since I don't have the file to look at.

White paneling at 230 is probably too high, white paper is 225 and paint is almost always less "white" than paper. However that is not likely the issue -- but again I couldn't get to root of the issue without seeing the file. That said, I would not have high expectations of the draft engine in these scenarios, it will clear (eventually) but take much longer (read: higher SL) than the production engine for the same interiors.

I show many examples of this fact here:http://sketchucation.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=372974#p372974

My best advice is to find a way to share the file with me so I can take a look -- anything else is just me guessing.

Best,
Jason.

KatrinK

Jason, thank you for the advices.

Chandelier really looks like if it was an emitter as a whole, but as far as i understand, it shouldn't be an emitter as character type = Auto.
It takes ages to render to SL20 (i think around 16 h last time) that's why I've replaced glass with AGS, but I see what you mean, I need to reconsider glass.

I've attached zip with the .skp(sorry .skp is too heavy to attach to the thread).
PS: I use "Walls" layer to hide/show walls if I need to adjust the view.

ChandellierWithNoGlass.rar

jason_maranto

I'm sorry to say that I just don't think the “Draft” engine is up to the task of a scene like this – I tried a bunch of things, and there were some issues, but fixing them had little impact of the draft engines output... at the end of the day the draft engine still can't clear the noise within a reasonable time/SL.
Draft engine SL18
If this is the type of scene you need to render often I think it really is going to be needful to use the production engine – which can do it no problem (see attached example).
Production engine SL14
On the off chance you want to know what I tried here is a description of what I changed (and the updated file):
ChandellierWithNoGlass_jmods.zip
After taking a look at the file I started to make some edits – the first thing I did was remove any geometry that wasn't needed for the render. Partially because this helps me get my bearings and find flaws but also because this makes the SketchUp file more compact. I made quite a few geometry changes and you can look at those and decide for yourself... most notably the chandelier and the rug.

Then I started looking at the Maxwell settings – in particular the camera settings were very unrealistic. You had it set for an EV of 1 – for interiors a EV of 5-7 is more normal.

Once I set the EV to 5 to get the camera exposure more natural I adjusted the materials – I added 2 materials: “jason emitter” and “jason emitter plane”. I used the first for the “bulbs” of the chandelier and the the second was used on a plane I set behind the camera to be used as a “fill light”.

Other than that I made some tweaks to the various materials looking for too bright colors or materials using textures which were too bright. I was careful to use the entity info palette and remove any conflicting materials – meaning if the group level had one material assigned but the subgroup level had another (the table set was an example of this).

I changed the wall and ceiling into my “painted wall” material, which you can download here:
http://www.maxwellrender.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=349725#p349725

Sorry I can't give you better news.

Best,
Jason.