kwhitt

@Ryan-M

I’ve been experimenting with Chief’s PBR rendering engine for the last few months attempting to push it to its limits.  Attached are images I produced for a master bath and PBR is quite capable with some postproduction work in Photoshop; however, there a few things missing that would really improve the realism:

·         The ability to change the phong angle of all components within a symbol.  This is very important as many of the renderings I see contain objects with far too much smoothing causing artifacts during rendering.

·         The ability to control the cubic material mapping of objects in all three axes.  Bitmaps can only be rotated on the Y axis which causes problems especially when applying tile materials to showers where the grout lines don’t sync.  You can see this on countertops too where the texture on the front vertical edge does not align with the horizontal surface.  If we could revolve/rotate the mapping in all three axes, this could be resolved.

·         The addition of pre-defined area lights so that it’s possible to accomplish many of the tricks used in interior photography.  It can be done now by creating a flat plane and assigning an emissive material but it’s time consuming to move around in the scene.  The area light would come in two forms – rectangular and disc-shaped.  The rectangular lights would emulate studio light boxes and the discs would be used for ceiling lights with controls for fall-off.

·         The addition of a shader that mimics the rounding of corners for objects in the scene.  Understandably so, Chief’s walls have sharp corners and having the ability to round them using a special bump map shader at time of render would add substantially to the realism and it would keep the file size down without all the added geometry.  Models imported into Chief would not have to be as detailed and heavy with this feature.

·         The addition of penumbra to spotlights and point lights.  There is no fall-off between shadow and light within the cone which is a dead giveaway.  The addition of IES lights would also solve this problem.

·         The addition of anisotropy to simulate brushed metals realistically.  Chief does allow separate roughness values for U and V, but I am unable to see where it makes any difference in my experiments.  If only applicable to models with UV’s, there should be a cubic mapping option; however, this will only be useful if we are able to rotate around all three axes as mentioned above.

·         The ability to specify the IOR of dielectric materials.  There is no way to differentiate between plastics, latex paint, and many other materials.  Everything comes out looking like plastic with varying sheens.

·         The addition of sub-surface scattering (SSS) to stimulate plastics such as Lucite and other acrylics, marble, and milk, etc.

·         The addition of postproduction filters in Chief.  At the very least, we should have the ability to control contrast or even better, a curves function such as that in Photoshop.  Without this capability the images are flat and lifeless.  It would also be nice to have more tone mapping options to prevent whites from blowing out a scene.  I like ACES but it is a bit too strong, and it would be nice if we could limit its impact with a slider.

·         The ability to control door swing angle and opening status with Layer Sets.  This would be a huge timesaver as I’m constantly opening and closing doors for different camera views.

·         The ability to control light attributes such as intensity and color via Light Sets.  It is now only possible to specify whether a light is on or off.  This can be a lot to keep track of – having to assign a Layer Set to each camera view that controls which of the lights are on and visible and at what intensity for each camera view.  It’s somewhat doable now but a lot of work and clumsy.

·         The ability to control the extent of denoising with a slider and the radius of the correction.  Often denoising is too much making the results blurry.  Furthermore, small resolution images require a smaller denoising radius as the pixels are so few.

I really hope Chief plans to expand the capabilities of their PBR engine as it has so much potential.  Raytracing takes far too long, and the results aren’t nearly as nice as PBR.  It would also be nice to avoid having to export entire projects to other rendering engines as you lose the parametric functions which work so well in Chief.  If the developers could deliver on this, I could dispose of my other software.

49 minutes ago, Renerabbitt said:

We’d want the backdrop (whether it's a static image or a non-light-emitting surface) to be visible to camera rays and specular/reflection rays, but not affect direct illumination or global illumination (GI). Separately, we'd want to assign either an HDRI or a solid environment color strictly for driving diffuse lighting and GI.

Precisely!

1 hour ago, Ryan-M said:

Currently, no.  This is something that I've looked at and I ran into enough questions I didn't have a great answer to that I shelved it.  For example, what constitutes "illumination"?  What do you expect to see through the window?  What do you expect to see in window reflections?  What do you expect to see in a mirror reflecting a window that you can see the backdrop through?

 

If you're just interested in a toggle that says "for pixels not occupied by anything else, display the backdrop" and uses a solid color for all lighting calculations then that's one thing, but I wasn't convinced that would really satisfy people.

 

Please do share them, I'm very interested in what kinds of things could make using the renderer simpler to use or produce better results for someone's use-case.

@Ryan-MThanks Ryan - I'll get my most recent updated wish list and post it in this thread.

20 hours ago, Renerabbitt said:

No and to my knowledge I am the only one who requested it. I talked with him in person about it. we need an advanced only tab in rendering options
See this post, and you can add your two cents in.. It will help out as they might log your additional requests

 

Thanks Rene.  Will do.  If we had the ability to prevent objects from casing shadows, I could make my own backgrounds which would have the same effect.  There are so many things I'd like to see added.

@Ryan-M  Ryan - Is there a way to use the HDRI as a backdrop only with no illumination?  The illumination would come from a white color only.  Thanks, Kevin

4 hours ago, Ryan-M said:

The top of the dialog allows you to configure how the fixture should produce light.  "On in Default Light Set" basically turns the light on in the default light set (so the light will cast light in any views using that light set).

 

We don't disable the punctual lights even when using an area light for a couple of reasons:

• The punctual lights can be used to configure the power output of the fixture (e.g. when "Apply Emissive and Color from Light(s)" is checked).  
• Area lights are only used in Ray Traced PBR views.  The punctual lights are still used in all other views.  We don't generally disable user interface in dialogs like this in a way that is dependent on the view the dialog was opened from.

There is a lot of complexity added to the dialog due to it needing to facilitate non-PBR techniques, hardware that doesn't support ray tracing, etc.

 

 

Yes.  You can think of "On in Default Set" as "can potentially cast light in the default light set", where part of the criteria for satisfying that potential is whether or not you're in Ray Traced PBR and the fixture is set to Use Area Lights.

 

 

The purpose of automatic exposure is to allow you to move the camera around and/or between lighting environments without needing to reconfigure exposure settings.  It simply tries to keep the output within a reasonable/viewable range as a function of the overall intensity of the rendered scene.  You are correct that it can make it difficult to "correctly" calibrate lighting.  If you're tuning a particular scene and your camera is static, then manually configuring exposure makes a lot of sense.

 

 

Backdrop intensity values are interpreted as Luminance.

Thanks Ryan.  Very helpful and it makes sense.  Kevin

18 minutes ago, Renerabbitt said:

@RenerabbittThanks, Rene.  You've saved me much time not having to experiment.  I appreciate the help!

 

4 hours ago, Ryan-M said:

 

Area lights and punctual lights on a single object are never used simultaneously.  If the "Use Area Lights" checkbox is checked (it is by default) then the emissive surfaces on the fixture produce light.  If it is not checked, then the punctual light sources produce light.

 

Punctual lights specify lumens which quantify total power output.  Emissive materials specify power per area (e.g. candela/square meter).  This makes it generally more difficult to work directly with emissivity.  An emissive material applied to a small bulb will produce significantly less light in your scene than the same material applied to a large bulb.

 

We wanted to allow people to continue to work with lumens. The "Apply Emissive and Color from Light(s)" checkbox allows the emissivity of the emissive material(s) on a fixture to be derived from the lumens specified in the punctual lights on the fixture.  If you have a fixture with a single point light that produces 1200 lumens and the "Apply Emissive and Color from Light(s)" checkbox is checked, then Chief will automatically calculate the appropriate emissivity of the emissive materials on the fixture such that all of the emissive surfaces on the fixture output a total of 1200 lumens.  The point light itself won't cast light, but its intensity (and color) will inform the properties of the emissive surfaces that make up the area light.

 

When "Apply Emissive and Color from Light(s)" is checked, Chief uses the sum of the punctual light sources on a fixture as the means by which you dictate the total power output of a fixture.

 

When you uncheck that box and directly configure the emissivity of a material you're no longer working in lumens, and it is correct that you will have to specify values much larger than typical lumen values in order to get the same results.  In general, I would recommend leaving that checkbox checked.

Ryan - Thanks for clarifying.  Please see attached Light Data DBX.  At the very top “Use Area Light(s)” is checked.  With Light 1 selected at the top, you have the option at the very bottom to check “On in Default Light Set”.  So, I assumed both types of lights were emitting or why have this option?  It would seem to me that by checking “Use Area Light(s)”, the ability to select Light 1 would be grayed out.  And Light 1 is shown to be used in “All Views” at the top.  So, “All Views” at the top would apply to only non-GPU RT types of rendering?

What happens if “On in Default Set” is not checked for Light 1?  Will the area light still inherit the properties of Light 1 and calculate the emissive in lumens if the material’s "Apply Emissive and Color from Light(s)" is checked?

8 hours ago, Renerabbitt said:

They are not being used in conjunction in GPU raytrace views. It's one or the other. The Area Light can inherit the lumen value from your punctual lights and it does seem that the value is in lumens vs "brightness" from the material itself
In terms of lumen output, manual exposure I believe is just taking an average of your scene's pixel values and then adjusting from there. In other words, I don't believe that this is a static approach in any given view, it depends on the pixel illumination of the shot when considering ambient light etc. So your lumen output in terms of exposure doesn't really mean anything at all. Lumen values on backdrop A at intensity of 12000 is going to look different than backdrop B at 12000.
his would be a question for Ryan or Dan most likely. Maybe Trent knows as well.
 

Thanks Renee.  I find the Light Data DBX confusing for reasons I'll state in a separate post to Ryan.  I've taken several interior courses on the use of Vray and Corona Renderer over the years from some well-known artists in those communities and they always speak of calibrating the scene for natural lighting first and then adding your interior accent lights (if appropriate).  This way you know your exposure is using real world settings which will allow the materials (shaders) to interact properly.  Neither of these renderers by Chaos Group have an "automatic exposure" setting or at least they didn't up until a year ago when I stopped using them.  I've only encountered this feature in TwimMotion and Chief.  Using automatic exposure would negate the process I describe above as you would never know if the scene was calibrated correctly.  That said, I'm not sure if Chief's Sun and default setting of 7000 under "Daytime Backdrop Intensity" represent any real world values.  I would imagine they do but have no idea what they are.

6 minutes ago, Renerabbitt said:

why don't you use automatic exposure?
in terms of it not looking correct, it shouldn't look correct, you would have to fake the geometry that would create your ies profile. We do not have any Ies profile compatibility so the actual geometry of the light would need to be produced in a way to fake the effect of proper beam spread, hot spotting, falloff etc. That's a tall order. Would switch to another software like thea if you are looking for that level of accuracy. 
Area lights are just taking the surface normal direction and if I were to guess, it probably takes the average surface normal direction as an equation to trace the path of light. Since usually we just have a mesh that is a flat plan such as a can light, the surface normal is straight down, so its not creating a cone at all. There is a lot more to this conversation but the short of it is that I would plan on editing in post or messing with manual exposure if you want more finite control

I don't use automatic exposure as it is impossible to balance the light correctly.  Lumens are now used to specify the total light output of a fixture regardless of the size or shape of the lens.  Unlike watts that is size dependent.  If the area light is indicated to be 800 lumens that's how much light it should emit.  That's not what I'm seeing in Chief when I use an area light on its own.  I am attempting to get clarification from Trent on why you can use the area lights in conjunction with a spot or point and how that affects the illumination.  I am not worried about the IES data of the fixture at this time although that would be nice - only the total light output.  I've been using Corona Renderer for over 15 years, and although Chief does not have many of the shader features such as SSS, I am getting very similar results with it without all the trouble of exporting to another software.  It's very close to a one software solution which saves me lots of time.

3 minutes ago, Renerabbitt said:

Assuming you have automatic exposure, your "metering" is being changed, so either change the automatic exposure setting or switch to manual. With automatic, as you turn lumens up, it will be adapting to the overall light in your shot. 

Thanks for the reply.  I never use automatic exposure.  The lumens do not seem correct to me when using an area light on its own.

4 hours ago, Chief_Trent said:

Hi Kevin. Yes, you can increase the brightness of your HDR backdrop by going into the rendering technique options in the Physically Based rendering technique and increasing the value of daytime or nighttime backdrop intensity (daytime for when the sun is turned on and nighttime for when it is off).

 

The backdrop is used for lighting calculations in PBR, acting as emissive by default. Other rendering techniques do not support an emissive backdrop.

 

Rene is correct here. The backdrop intensity is the only setting directly applied to backdrop lighting. In PBR with automatic exposure, turning up the brightness of the backdrop may not appear to make much of a difference in the lighting of the scene. This is because the perceived brightness of lights is relative to the brightness of other lights in how it is displayed on screen. For example, a room with a lamp might appear dark when viewed from outside, but then when moving the camera into the room, it appears to light up and the lamp seems much brighter. (The exposure adjusts automatically when entering a darker space). Similarly, the brightness of the sun or other light sources relative to your backdrop intensity will impact how much light seems to be coming from the backdrop. Therefore, turning the sun brightness down will make the backdrop seem brighter. If you want to get the most from your HDR backdrop, you can turn on the "Use Only Backdrop For Lighting" setting in the rendering technique options, which will essentially set the brightness of the sun to zero, so the majority of the light in the scene will come from the backdrop and it will appear brighter.

@Chief_TrentThanks Trent.  It's good to know that turning off the sun (which I do often) requires that you increase the Nighttime Backdrop Intensity.

Maybe you can answer something for me.  Why do we have the ability to use both area lights and the point or spot light when it is already used in a fixture.  For example, I have created my own downlights (celling LED's) which have a spot light aimed at the floor.  In addition to this, the lens on this light has an emissive material applied.  I realize that the most accurate way is to use the area light from the lens solely (without the spot) or at least that is how it's done in other software I use.  However, when working with the area light alone, I must turn up the intensity of the lumens to an unreasonable amount to get the output I would expect to see (such as a 1,000 lumen ceiling light).  The area light alone needs to be set to 10k or more.  When the spot light and the area light are used together, the lumens seem to be more accurate.  What is the most accurate way in Chief to represent a 800 to 1,000 ceiling downlight.  In combination or area light alone?  Also, how does ticking "Apply Emissive and Color from Light(s)" factor in?  Does this retain true area lighting with the spot light settings driving the output?  Or am I even getting an area light when I do this?  This is not as straight forward as it is in other PBR software.  All I know is that when I use area lights alone, I am not getting the expected lumen output which leads me to believe I am doing something wrong.

5 hours ago, Renerabbitt said:

Backdrop Intensity is the only thing that effects your backdrop, though with automatic exposure, your sun settings effect(percieved) it as well

Thanks Renee.  I see that now.

Is there a way to increase the brightness of an HDRI used as a backdrop?  Thanks, Kevin

23 hours ago, robdyck said:

This happens only when a polyline is converted to a molding. Instead, select the molding from the library and draw on the intended surface using the Molding Line tool. If you start with cad lines, just leave them there and draw over them with the Molding Line tool, using them as snap references.

I have reported this to Chief a long time ago...as soon as it became a problem actually.

 

Keep in mind that the Molding Polyline tool will draw moldings at some interpretation of 90 degrees from what is intended. This is why it is better to use the Molding Line tool and then complete the shape once the molding has been established.

Also reported...but not fixed.

Thanks Rob!

15 minutes ago, Alaskan_Son said:

Go to Chief's home page>My Account>Technical Support Center>New Case

Thanks!

2 minutes ago, Alaskan_Son said:

Funny you bring this up, I started noticing some issues with these moldings recently as well.  You're not wrong.  The values can be incorrect, and converting a polyline to a molding causes the resulting molding polyline to offset.  The latter definitely seems like a bug.  The other though is a little debatable depending on which values you actual want to see.  The values in that Polyline tab will vary depending on exactly how the polyline is drawn, how you have your polyline selected, and in which view/editing plane you're working.  The reported lengths/areas in that dialog seem to report the length/area of the polyline shape is it relates to a very specific plane. 

 

If you want simple molding lengths, you should probably be using the Components tab, the Materials List, text macros, or the Ruby Console to get that perimeter or molding length. 

 

Thanks Michael.  I was just getting ready to start a ticket but as usual I cannot find the link.  It's as if Chief does not want you to open a ticket.  Do you have a direct link?  Kevin

I've also noticed that you are unable to select a vertical segment within a molding polyline in a camera view.  I prefer doing my take-offs in 3D if there's not much to count as I find it faster than creating a material list.

First, when adding molding from an elevation view, the resulting profile gets offset quite a far distance from the intended location.  After created, it must be manually moved into place every time.  3D molding polylines used to fall into place perfectly. 

Second, the Length/Perimeter under the Polyline tab is totally inaccurate - see attached.  This example is made up of 4 sides with two segments at 36-1/2" wide and two segments at 10" in height - although I am unable to select the vertical segments in a 3D camera view.  The total perimeter should equal 93" while the dialog box reports 73".  I very often use this feature to calculate molding quantities which is totally useless to me now.  Instead of orbiting around the room in a camera view and adding up the total lengths, I now must create 2D elevations of each wall and manually add all the segments together.  It doesn't seem to be a problem in plan view where I often use "Make Room Polyline" to calculate shoe and baseboard.  I no longer trust Chief to return accurate molding measurements.  Granted, this is a file created in X15 now being edited in X16 if that factors in.  Has anyone else experienced strange behavior from the new Molding Polyline? Can someone confirm the Length/Perimeter readings are off? 

19 hours ago, ValleyGuy said:

 

I send the elevation to layout as a live view - 'update on demand', then go to the layout and open up the view and change it to plot lines and make the line weight thinner (1 instead of 18). Only because I want to adjust the default line weight and the only place to adjust the line weight is to open up the layout view.

 

You could send the elevation to layout as plot lines, the lines will be whatever your default line weight is. You have to go to the layout and open up the view to see what your default line weight is then adjust to what you would like.

 

If you make adjustments to an object back in the elevation, then you would need to update the layout view. There will be a prompt before closing out the elevation to ask if you want to update the layout (you can always go to the layout and refresh as well).

 

Yes, changes / additions to text and dimensions in the elevation will be dynamic and not need the layout view to be manually updated. They just appear on the layout and are always current. 

 

The plot line weight just comes in at a default that is quite heavy, mine is 18. From another thread from a while ago, no one seems to be able to adjust the default value now that Chief took away that option. I don't like the 18 weight so I adjust it to 1.

 

 

Shayne - thanks for the breakdown.  I will give it a good.  Kevin

36 minutes ago, JKEdmo said:

Layout boxes are transparent.  Content will show through.

Thanks Jim.  I'm going to give it a try.  Kevin

7 hours ago, JKEdmo said:

One crazy thought -- could you do it with 2 superimposed layout boxes?

 

One behind with black and white live view with all annotation turned off.  One in front with only annotations turned on and in color?

I thought about that too but thought it would be difficult to get everything to align properly, but maybe not if it's an exact duplicate of the same elevation.  This will, of course, require that I have two elevations for every view I'm after.  This might be worth a try though unless the topmost layout box hides the one below.  Do you know the behavior of overlapping layout boxes? Thanks.

7 hours ago, ValleyGuy said:

@kwhitt DB and Joey are correct, plot lines is the way to do this. All cameras will work as far as I know, and the plot plan view keep dimensions live. I don't like to bog down my computer with constantly updating the layout, plus CA decided to drop the line weight adjustment option in the 'send to layout' pop up window a few years back.... so I always send the camera elevation to the layout as 'update on demand'. Then in the layout I open up the view and check the plot lines and adjust the line weights. This only gives plot lines, so textures don't work and glass house goes to plot lines, however, depth cue does work nicely. If you leave the layout box boarders larger, Text, Rich Text and Dimensions are live and show up automatically when added to the plan elevation with no updating required on the layout. If there was a way to set the default line weights (like it was before), without having to do this step manually in every layout box......

 

  

Thanks Shayne.  Just so that I understand, are you saying send the elevation as a plot view and disable updating,  Any changes/additions to text and dimensions will be updated automatically without changing the original plot lines as long that they aren't generated again?  What does this have to do with the line weight adjustment though?

9 hours ago, basketballman said:

Pull down dimension string, do a screen capture, then copy/paste just the string ?

Only thing I can think of ..

Bob - thanks for the reply.  I'm not sure I follow you.  Are you saying take a screen grab of the elevation without the dimensions and then overlay the dims in layout?

19 hours ago, DBCooper said:

I think that is pretty easy if you send the view using "plot lines" but that isn't really live anymore.  You might be able to get pretty close using technical illustration instead of a normal vector view.  Maybe someone else has some better ideas because I can't think of anything else at the moment.

 

Thanks DB.

I believe I’ve asked this question before but can’t find the original post.  I would like to create a live view of a wall without color but have my dimensions and notes in red.  For example, keep everything in the view attached exactly as it is, but have the dimension line of 95-5/8” in red.  Thanks, Kevin