Wrapped up the rendering

I saw that Vray for Rhino is getting RT. Is this good news that the next plugin for SU will have the same? http://www.flyingarchitecture.com/v-ray-for-rhino-realtime/

They sent me this file a couple of weeks ago. I figured it was going to be old. Best advice is to stay away from VRIMG and go with EXR if you really need to go about this method to save memory. I want my channels for post processing, so I never use this method. I got burned once and never did it again.

Here is the test render. This uses color set in the refraction because fog would not work at all.

Using an emmissive material on a coil is insanity in my opinion. It just seems like overkill for an interior rendering. Are the lights meant to be clear glass so you see the coil inside? If this is the case, I would just make a generic flat 2d piece in the shape of a coil to reduce the amount of geometry. If its not a clear bulb, I would just make an emmissive material on the bulb glass and use a bulb model with as few faces as possible to get the effect.

I would use omni lights along with rectagular lighting to get fill light and be aware, that the more lights in the model, the longer the rendering is going to take. For a production rendering, you are going to want to crank up the subdivisions on the lights also. I recently had some high detail interiors that used natural light along with omnis,IES, and rectangular lights and each view took 14 hours to cook.

This is the latest converter that was sent to me from Chaos, not sure if its going to work with the latest version. I have not tested it out yet. Let me know how it works.

vrimg2exr.zip

What kind of material is it? Could be an issue using a new material with the old V-ray. I do believe you will need the latest plugin to use some of the newer cooler materials.

So I did not want to give up on the fog issue yet because this is how Fernando has always said you color glass. I made a series of glass boxes using a blue fog color. The front row starts at 1' thick on the left and works its way down to 2" thick. The panes in the back are 1/2" thick and half in size as they move left.

This is all great information. Thanks guys. I will post the render when I wrap up a good draft.

That worked! Now, is this a 'cheat'? I've learned in the past that you want to use fog for colored glass. I have never used the color setting in this fashion to achieve colored glass.

@andybot said:

Try setting the refraction "color" option instead of fog. I believe fog does have to do with volume, which may be why the small pieces don't cast color.

I modeled a window with a bunch of tiny pieces, all the glass parts are 3D with a 1/2" thickness and the faces are oriented correctly, but when I render it using a colored glass material (color is set under the fog), it doesn't render with any color. I tried to crank up the color multiplier as high as 10.0 and that didnt work either. I replaced the window with a solid pane glass using the same material and that rendered correctly. So the question is, does the overall size of the piece of glass effect it's ability to be colored? Now I know that thickness would affect it, but I didn't think the area size of the piece would.

It's all about the photo you are matching. Sometimes I have very little issue putting my rendering into a photo using photomatch and sometimes it does not work at all because the way SketchUp takes those match lines and creates the scene tab camera view. Sometimes its so distorted that when you just hit zoom ever so slightly (the trick to getting Vray to render the match) it zooms way out and the perspective vanishing points are reset. It's just one of those things you need to tread carefully around I guess.

I am shocked to see that Vray cannot do this (using a material) I am going to have to model the window and glass. Dang!

Yes, that's true but I have found that you are going to want more flexibility than that, so it's good to understand that you need a very high value in order to start seeing some light from an IES file.

Any tricks out there for taking a stained glass image texture and get the light to project through it on to a wall?

Andybot's right. I thought you were looking to get a blurred reflection. I second that tinting the relfection may help a bit. Is that a glass shelf on top? If so, make sure its a full solid group and apply a real glass texture with refraction in order to get the most real results.

Seems like it may be a bug. Do you have any refraction on that glass material? Have you tried to use a glass material from the Chaos website to see if it creates the same issue?

A note with using IES lights, is that you really need to crank up the Power before you see them. This is a common problem that people experience. You may need to turn it up to something like 50,000 before you see some light. It all depends on the file you are using. It's not uncommon for a setting of 300,000-500,000 power on an IES light.

It's reflecting the color of your wall and ceiling. I would use a Fresnel reflection and turn the perpendicular color down to something like 75-60. I would also turn glossiness down to .9-.85 and increase your subdivisions to something like 22-30 for best results.

I have had those error messages and the DR has worked. As long as it says waiting for jobs, I think it will work. If the machines you are sending the render to are slow and the file is large, then they will take a while before they start rendering buckets.

My understanding is that the DR spawner is still rather buggy. I gave up on it because it would take forever to start, buckets would be rendering the wrong view, or darker, just weird stuff. It worked sometimes and then others it just did weird stuff. I got a workstation with an i7 multithreaded processor and my render times were cut in half. Thats my best advice for now.