Designer1

Does anyone know how to adjust the shine on chiefs hand scraped wood floors? I went into properties and tried to adjust roughness but its grayed out and cannot be adjusted. I love the texture and depth but the shine makes the floors look like they are made of plastic. They are such great floors its just the shine is way too much. Thanks!

Thanks Graham! Yes, the interior PBRs were helped greatly by your recommendation of the emissivity of the walls thanks for that idea! As for the added lights for the exterior landscaping I believe I had the shadows turned off. I do know that my fake sun (added lights) were very close to the ground because I thought if I had it too far away from the trees shadow it wouldnt lighten it up.... so maybe if I place it, like your recommended 300-600' above grade 0 maybe thats the trick. I will give a few of these ideas a try and see how it works out. I find the PBRs to be like a balancing act and you cant really use common sense when trying to accomplish a good realistic PBR. Its like since everything from shadows and sun are fake and you dont use real life lighting logistics to create a good rendering, you have to change the way you build the landscape and scene. I found the raytraces, although more time consuming, to kind of automatically take care of some of these technicalities that you have to consider before starting the PBRs. It will be interesting to see in future releases of chief how they further develop the raytraces and PBRs. Thanks again!

Graham, great examples, thank you! Yeah Im noticing everything you have mentioned on this post about the differences between raytrace and PBR. I noticed on interior PBR's that the more you reduce the suns lumens the brighter the interior lights get and the harder it is to control them without it getting dark. So its been a balancing act. I LOVE raytrace shadows and wish PBR had them especially for the landscaping. Your right though the amount of time it requires is too much. My biggest frustration at this point is reducing the shadows of the PBR trees. I can reduce the suns power down to 1000 and add a light of 1,000,000 lumens and it still doesn't reduce the amount of darkness in the shadow very much. So clearly im not selecting something in my camera DBX or am missing something completely. Can you tell me on the post you were showing your lightened tree shadows how many lights and at what lumens they were to get the tree shadows to look that good? I cant get even close to that... they still look sharp edged and fake. Thanks!

Thanks for the information everyone. Yes I can see what your talking about Michael with the shadows. I did a PBR and the linen tower appeared to have a shiny surface, even though it wasn't set to be shiny yet when I selected matte the texture looked out of place, like I just used clip art and placed it into the bathroom, it was strange. The time it takes for raytracing is still so much that's why Im trying to use PBR. Sometimes for a really crisp and clear raytrace it can take 20-30 minutes... so if you have 100 raytraces to do it takes forever. Glad at least that we have two options now to try and work with.

Wow interesting Graham thanks for the examples. Were both of those PBR's done with the edge smoothing when idle on? I didn't think such a small angle would create this. Thanks for letting me know, I will make sure this is taken care of before taking the picture.

Thanks everyone for all the input. I hope this topic didn't get anyone fired up over apple vs pcs because Im sure they both have positive and negatives. Just to clarify my alienware is a desktop not a laptop but is a few years old. I use to spend a lot on a desktop then keep it for several years but now I realize I can be ok with one that is not the latest components and save thousands because in the end they all get outdated and old anyway. I decided to call Chief tech support to ask them about this. They said that the mac mini wouldn't get the jobs done as well as my older alienware and it would actually take the apple longer to get it done. I asked about the external gpu that was suggested might work, but they said they advise against it as it hasn't been tested out by them to see how Chief would run. I guess from what tech support told me is that the Mac mini only runs graphics on a chip versus a video card and my alienware has two dedicated graphics cards. So even though its a few years old it still would be quicker then the Mac mini. Im open to a new computer experience in trying Apple out in the future but think at this time upgrading the alienware might be the best and most cost efficient way to go. I mentioned to my friend what tech support told me and he said he was cool with helping me upgrade my alienware if it will get the job done better with chief so that was really nice of him. Eventually Id like to try a top shelf Apple during my next brand new big computer buy and see how I like it. I like my iphones so far, so its nice to try new things and see how they work. My main goal was that chief would work just as good as my current computer if not better given I was looking to get something newer and at least a bit better. Thanks everyone for giving me your opinions on your computer experiences it was great to hear.

Graham, thanks for the additional information I will give that a try. Jintu, yes I had the edge smoothing turned on so that's why I was unsure why this was happening. Maybe its like what Graham said that if the camera is slightly off angle it can cause the lines to be jagged. I will try a few things out and see if it persists. Thanks for the all the help!

Thanks Jintu! I also noticed that even though I have the smooth lines when idle on some of the lines seem jagged and not as smooth as raytracing. For instance around my windows and such... is this just my computer or do you experience this as well? I remember there use to be final view button that would straighten that out but im not sure that works in PBR. I also noticed that some of my metal can appear black or blue tinted for some reason. Even if I rainbow tool click on it and its the same metal as other areas in the picture that appear accurate to the metal type. Thanks for the setting recommendations... clearly the lighting, especially the can lights look amazingly better!

Thanks for the help Ryan!

Ryan, thanks for the input. Is there any advise on this buy? Surely Im grateful for the gift, I just don't know much about adding GPUs etc. You run on mac but its the pro model...which Im sure is a lot more costly... do the bigger macs allow for customization? Yes, that's what he told me... he said Macs are built 1000 times better on everything then a regular pc, even my alienware brand. I cant argue given I don't know much about Apple and hes a senior director computer engineer. haha. SO I just say ok whatever you say about computers I believe you. I just wanted to ask the Chief community because I know our software isn't the regular stuff everyone uses and may require different system requirements. Thanks for your help!

My friend is like MR APPLE. He loves everything apple and has been convincing me to switch from my alienware and I wont budge. Chief works fine with my pc and have always been a pc vs mac person. My family have bought me two apple iphones and now Im starting to grow on liking Apple. Now my friend said that's it hes going to buy me a mac mini and that it will be worlds better then my alienware. Im still hesitant but it appears he is buying it regardless so Im grateful yet unsure how chief will be on it. I know with pcs you have to make sure the video cards etc are in alignment with chief. Does anyone know how Mac minis work with Chief? I went on the apple website and it doesn't appear to have a million choices of video cards to use. So do they just work out of the box with the default way they are built with Chief? Im trying to get some input on things to look for or switch before he orders anything because if I do get the computer I want it to work well with Chief. Thanks for any input!

Graham, Thanks for all of that information. No I hadn't looked into all those details in relation to the exposure auto adjustment you mentioned. This does seem to be unusual but I will test these settings out, Im sure that's what the problem is. I took everyones above recommendations for the sun and exposure when it came to interior renderings and those appeared to turn out good its the exterior ones that are iffy. So yes, the Sun I just left on default which I think is something crazy like 100,000 lumens and the exposure is .18. So do you also set PBR exposure to max for interior renderings as well to prevent the auto adjusting or just exteriors? I will test out these different adjustments and see what results I can get. I really appreciate you giving us all a heads up on all these auto adjustments that the PBR settings do that we all might not have otherwise known about. Thanks Graham!

Graham, I tried adding four lights to the plan and even ramped up the lumens to a ridiculous amount to see if it would make a difference but it didn't. For some reason when I toggle off the sun the lights show up but when I switch the sun back on they disappear and make no difference to the trees shadows. I have to be missing a lighting option to get this to work. Heres a couple pictures of what Im talking about. Thanks!

Graham, thank you for your suggestion! Can you tell us more about how you position your type of lights and the lumens you recommend? I used a light out in the landscape to mimic sundown light on the side of the house tinted orange and set it about 200" above the ground @1200 lumens. I have not used it for reducing tree shadow harshness. Using these lights to reduce tree shadows how close to the trees do you place them and at what lumens? How do you prevent these lights from lighting the other areas of the scene? This whole PBR experience is so different then raytrace that its really taking some getting use to the new way of thinking of the rendering process. I sure appreciate you and others help and guidance with the PBR's Im finding it to be very informative. Thanks!

I have been working on the PBR and there are lots of benefits to them but can see what everyone is talking about with some of the limitations as well. I like the shadows in raytrace and don't like the blocky look of the shadows in PBR. Does anyone know if theres a way to somehow copy and paste into our library the 3d shadows used for non 3d trees in raytrace so we can manually place them in the PBR? I know Im probably grabbing at straws for this idea but though id throw it out there. I figure each non 3d tree has the have some kind of shadow to its file... too bad we couldn't at least place a 3d tree in PBR, turn off its shadows and then place the non 3d tree shadow behind it so it looks more real. I better go walk my Pug Im too wrapped up in everything ideas in Chief!

Wow thank you so much for all the recommendations and advice! Its nice to know there are several options to remedy the shadow problems. I will try each of recommendations made on here and see which one works best for this plan. Thank you both for the replies and I appreciate all the time and effort.

Can anyone give me any lighting advice on how to lighten up the pitch black shadows under the island? I was also looking at how the recessed lights don't lighten up the ceiling as well as they do in a raytrace either... so Im trying to experiment with different lighting to try and get this to look as realistic as possible. This is my first PBR interior rendering. I can see the benefits and the challenges that everyone was talking about earlier and it does take some getting use to.

Thanks Michael, I will keep all that in mind. At least we have two different options to work with so hopefully I can find a use for both of them.

Does anyone know where the default raytrace options went? I looked on X11 help resource but the directions there aren't accurate to how the program is set up??? Heres what Im talking about... It works in 3d if you hit the raytrace camera button but where is it in defaults? Thanks!

Thanks everyone for the replies. Yikes...looks like Im going to have to use a combination of Raytrace and PBR. This should be interesting. Yeah Ill just stick with Raytracing for the exteriors then as it sounds not very favorable to use PBR for exteriors. From other topics on PBR is sounds like interior renderings using PBR are as good if not better then raytracing... so I will have to see how that goes. It seems from more experienced users on here that posted earlier that minor tweaking of the lights and sun are the only changes I might need to make as far as interior lighting goes. Cheers to the adventure of raytrace and PBR renderings coming up! Thanks again for the replies and input!

Thanks for the reply Mick! I just got to this right now sorry for the delay. I figured out how to get the shadows to work for the most part in PBR but don't know why the shadows aren't working for the trees? The shadows work for the trees in raytrace but not PBR.... is there a secret lever Im suppose to pull to get these shadows to work for landscaping?? Im trying to use humor to keep myself in the game as Im learning this PBR thing...lol.

I started setting my first PBR up and took notes of all the advice on this thread. Now the only thing that seems to be off is the sun...haha. For some reason with global illumination on and everything else on I cant seem to find where to turn the sun on. I have the sun angle and everything else on. Basically it just has the same lighting 360 degrees around the house. Im sure this is something stupid I have selected and its simple but because I haven't even done a raytrace in three years let alone PBR its confusing me. Any ideas where the switch for the sun is? Im trying to find humor in my mix up. Thanks!

Thanks a Million Mick! Im so excited to have some of the old ones back... the X11 ones seem so limited. Thanks again!

Im using X11 and noticed that a lot of the nice previous backdrops are no longer available. I don't have any other versions of chief installed but do have the files on the computer. How can I go back into previous versions of chief to just import the backdrops without installing the whole older programs again? Im not sure why the older backdrops would have been discontinued there were a lot of good ones. Thanks!

Great, thanks for the input Bill I will give that a try too!