Has anyone ever come across any clear documentation for all of these effects? The fact that there are so many cool procedural maps available, but the tutorials for how to utilise them are not seems a waste.

I've spent a good few hours playing around with them before but managed to get no practical use out of them because, as you know, with all the variables you can change it would take weeks or months to learn anything through trial an error.

This is probably less of an issue for Max users who tend to have had some kind of professional training, but those who use Sketchup for visualisation are at the shallow end of the visualisation pool are largely self trained I imagine. (Along with using amazing resources such as Sketchucation, of course )

Nice promotion, but a shame it's not extended to outside the US also.

As well as the other suggestions, have you tried increasing the HSph subdivs (under the irradiance map rollout) to something like 80-150 to reduce the blotchiness?

Is the example you posted the emissive test?

I think emissive would be the way to go, I'm not 100% sure what went wrong when you tried it?

If it looked too orthogonal and you wanted more of a faded feel to it you could just gaussian blur it in photoshop. Or you could try cutting a channel around the perimeter of the underside of the platform and set a strip of emissive material at an angle inside the channel. I imagine this would give a better effect, although I'm just thinking out loud here

good luck either way... will be interesting to see what other solutions there are

EDIT: For emissive you would have to play around with the intensity value. And for rectangular lights you can control the softness of the shadows by changing the shadow radius value... try something like 40 to start with then go higher/lower

Cool, thank you for the pointer. That's a new one for me.

Nice one, I was surprised to see that the background was made up of quite a few images. It's amazing what you can do in photoshop, but I always wonder how to get closer to these atmospheric images just through using Vray (especially with clients who change their minds a lot - all that photoshop work can go down the drain). Still, it's a beautiful final image he's created.

Peter Guthrie manages to get very atmospheric renders without much post production... maybe time to start looking at 3DS max I wonder?

Ahh my bad, I meant to type "I have GI and BG switched off and am only using HDRI dome"... I think the bright skies are in some cases the realistic effect with these camera settings... must learn to tweak them better and maybe start experimenting with the Aperture F value.

Thanks again for the tip though, I'm sure if other people are checking in on this thread it could help them also

Hi,

Thanks for the suggestion I will try this, but I wonder how it will effect the illumination... you would expect it to make everything brighter, but I'm not sure by how much.

I wonder if it's possible to add a Tiff as the BG colour with a white bottom half and a transparent top half... this might stretch all the way to the horizon and not have any effect on the lighting... although it might not be a uniform shade of white if it is environmentally mapped. Will have to test!

Any more suggestions welcome.

Hi guys,

This might be a stupid question but... is it possible to have a solid floor level that reaches the horizon?

I ask because I am trying to render an animation in Vray, but the bottom half of the HDRI I'm using is black. Because my camera is quite high up and angled towards the ground level, a lot of this black is very visible in the rendered images. I have attached a screen shot below.

I can't recolour the HDRI sub-horizon to white as this will be used to produce lighting. There might be another solution, but a physical floor to the horizon is the only one I can think of.

Because it is an animation, there are hundreds of images - so editing each one individually post production isn't really an option

Thanks for any advice!

Jack

Hey guys,

Thanks for the pointers, and for the link. I'm not on my computer at the moment, but for that scene I was using something like Sun no clouds 1103 I think it was called.

I have GI and BG switched off and am only using GI... I think some of the problem comes when I use artificial lights, as I don't have much experience in setting the power of them - so sometimes the camera settings I use are incorrect to compensate for darkness. Still got a lot to learn!

Hey guys,

I've recently bought some HDRIs from Peter Guthrie, and have started using them in place of the vray GI and Background system. One thing I repeatedly have trouble with is the exposure of the skies when rendering - they almost always look pale and faded.

Even with a very low burn value in Reinhard colour mapping of 0.05, and a high shutter speed on the physical camera 100 the sky is very washed out - and these settings tend to make the rest of the scene quite dark.

I was just wondering if anyone can suggest other settings to tinker with, or maybe a box I need to check/uncheck to bring the colour and detail back to the sky.

Thanks

Hi there,

Has anyone ever tried rendering something like the image below - and if so what kind of material setup would you be using? I can't get my head around how to do it... put an omni light inside a spherical ball and add a diffuse map and transparency map?

Thanks for any pointers )

EDIT................. think i just answered my own question, sorry I'm half asleep today!

Have you tried increasing the HSph subdivs (under the irradiance map rollout) to something like 80-150 to reduce the blotchiness?

Something useful to consider when creating a displacement map, courtesy of http://viscorbel.com/vray-materials-theory/#comment-6946

"The deformations work like this – middle grey [128;128;128] of the map does not change anything on the object, darker values push the surface inwards while lighter values pull it out. The further this value is from medium gray, the stronger is the effect. Color of the map is not taken into account and only the lightness value is used."

This is good to know when you don't want the geometry created by the displacement to extend beyond the modelling you've laid out... eg bricks protruding though picture frames hanging on the wall

The 'free hand' zorro cut tool works well for me, but I get an instant bugsplat when I try to use the section plane to cut the model - even if it's a simple 6 sided box.

Even tried babak's workflow above but am experiencing the same problem. I'm on SUpro 2013.

Anyone experiencing the same thing?

Hi there,

I'm having trouble getting the materials to import with the model. The mtl file is in the same folder as the obj file, but it seems to replace the materials with random colours. I did tests with free models, but they're from designconnected which seems like a reputable site so I'm not sure what's stopping the import correctly. This is the chest which is supposed to be wood/iron.

Any ideas what might be causing this?

Regards

Jack

@rspierenburg said:

Jack,
I'm not sure about your first question, but as far as the second is concerned you can use a Plugin called Component Spray by Didier Bur.

Hi there,

Thanks for the suggestion. I have tried using that plugin before but it wouldn't work, not sure if I'm doing something wrong or if it's not compatible with SU 2013. Basically I've installed it and the interface shows up on the toolbar, but when I click either of the spray buttons nothing happens....

Just looked into the plugin thread for compo spray where I mentioned this happening and apparently it's a permissions issue. Will try to fix

Thanks again

For some reason if I rightclick the group with the proxy inside and 'save as', then the materials are lost again... but if I just save the file I've imported the proxy into then it works.

One more question though.. if you have a tile of 3D grass saved as a proxy, how do you distribute that proxy over a designated area, particularly if it's an organic shape?

@fcborik said:

Hi Jack,

Thanks very much Frank, I will be sure to check these guys out!

@valerostudio said:

There is no need to do that. Which Gunthrie HDRI are you using? If the sun is hidden behind clouds, then this is an overcast HDRI and will no produce a direct shadow, just like real life. Try the HDRI I sent a link to, this worked perfectly for me. If you get the same issue with this HDRI, then I can look at your file.

I was using the HDRI called "1808 Blue Sky White Clouds", where the sun is very visible but there is some cloud. Also the sun is quite low so maybe this is having an effect too. Switching to the other HDRI did make a big difference. Thanks for all the help - you seem to be answering my posts left, right and centre! Hero!