limitless8

Well this version is also available here for pretty much the same money

7 hours ago, OkcDesigner said:

Here is what I got in July. works very well, and same video card and mem as desk top.

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/asus-rog-gu501gm-15-6-laptop-intel-core-i7-16gb-memory-nvidia-geforce-gtx-1060-1tb-hybrid-drive-128gb-ssd-brushed-black/6207900.p?skuId=6207900

 

A lower budget and in the middle of the two video cards you list.

So you ended up going with a 1060 zephyrus, it's one of the machines I listed, because paying extra for a 1070 version I wasn't sure about....a youtube reviewer also said that the zephyrus as much as hte battery life is less than the msi, but overall it's a better build.  How has your experience been with PBR if you do that, and do you use you objects from 3d sktechup?

yeah but that's the thing, I am not looking for a desktop replacement, more of a mobile machine to do corrections on the go, on the spot with clients.

1 minute ago, TheKitchenAbode said:

 

I think they both look good. Maybe the reason you prefer the night time is due to the fact that a lot of the detail is hidden due to the low light levels. On interior shots with higher levels of light it's more obvious when a model or material is not quite right.

Yeah I think you hit the nail on the spot.  Many times high levels of day time light really make furniture and all look just not right.  I tried your tips on max sun lumens and lights at 3000, played around with the settings, sometimes it hit the spot, sometimes it just over blew it....still trial and error

New project that I'm working on, I find that when it comes to PBR, I can get better more realistic results with night time views and lights, in comparison to day time.  

So, I posted in a different topic I found regarding laptops, but thought it wouldn't hurt to maybe get some more coverage from all chiefers!

I am in the market to buy a laptop, seeing as I have come to move around more often, and need a mobile solution to update project details.

I haven't been on a laptop in ages, so I am open to hearing the experience all of you have had with a 1060 card laptop, and a 1070.  Seeing as I will be doing PBR images only, and that's all GPU nowadays.   I have forgotten what it's like to ray trace. )

I am definitely in the market for a 15 inch laptop, 6 cores, and well as said, which graphics card?  Ideally I would take a gigabyte aero 15x with 4k display and 1070, but with shipping and taxes it will come out more than I want to pay at the moment.

So far the top contenders are a ROG zephyrus new gen with normal keyboard layout, msi stealth 65, and even though I love the xps 4k display and color accuracy, the 1050ti just sounds like a 1.2 engine when you know you  need a v8 5.0...

So anybody who owns laptops with 1060 and 1070, and does PBR, let me know your thoughts of how much of a difference I would notice, in comparison to me using a 980 strix now on my workstation (which will be updated to a 1080 soon).

Thanks for the help ahead of time!

On 10/18/2018 at 1:23 AM, Toby-PKBLDR said:

There were a lot of reviews on BB and they were universally positive. 

What did you end up getting?  

I am currently in the market to buy a laptop as well, and it's been a head bang...the msi stealth is professional looking and light, has both the 1060 and 1070 versions...also the new asus rog zephyrus looks solid, and powerful...Thing is I haven't worked on a laptop in ages, so I would be curious to hear some opinions of people who own a 1060 laptop, and a 1070...how big is the difference when it comes to pbr rendering, seeing as I am pbr all the way now, and its all gpu based, I don't do ray tracing anymore.
 

So any thoughts, any help in making the decision I would appreciate!

I personally would buy a gigabyte aero 15x with a 4k display and 1070, but with shipping and taxes it'll come out more than I am willing to pay for a laptop at the moment.

The Table looks realistic and has that raytrace feel on the glass.  I use metallic only for the glass on chandeliers mostly.  Ever since pbr I stopped using raytrace and when I tried I found I didn't have the patience anymore to wait for a uhd size result.  Only reason I tried was when doing exterior views of the house the windows come off as dull and grey/whiteish and ruin the shot.  While as we all remember in raytrace it gave good reflections...so if you have s texture and solution for that please do share

11 hours ago, TheKitchenAbode said:

 

Thanks, still playing with this to see what other improvements can be obtained. Focus right now is to get the glass looking better.

 

The hardwood is the Walnut 5" Plank - Natural from the CA main library.  The properties are "Polished", U & V Roughness = 10%. I also adjusted the color.

 

Concerning the PBR settings, the camera exposure is 0.25, brightness is 75%. The sun is 100,000 Lux and as a reference the recessed lights are 3,000 lumen. However, I would not take these settings as a golden rule, they will vary according to each scene. As I have noted before, it seems that the most important first thing is to find the right balance between the suns direct and indirect contribution and that of the interior light fixtures.

 

Here is the scene showing how it changes according to the type of light. This demonstrates a bit of the challenge, neither of the 1st three scenes are acceptable, 1st scene is too dark, 2nd scene is better but sun is way overexposing certain areas, 3rd scene better overall balance but lights are causing overexposed regions. 4th and final, everything balances out. I have made no adjustment to any properties other than turning the Sun and Lights on or off.

 

No Sun, no lights. Bright areas are just where I have added some emissivity to some materials.

 

Just the sun turned "ON"

 

Just the light fixtures turned "ON"

 

Both Sun and Light fixtures turned "ON"

 

As can be seen there is a countering effect that takes place between the sun and the lights. When they are on their own the scenes exhibit regions of over exposure but together this overexposure seems to cancel out. As you can likely also deduce, it would be a total waste of time attempting to adjust material properties in any of the scenes other than the last one. Lighting first and then material properties.

 

Thank you very much for all the input and effort you put into helping everybody on the forum.  Actually now using some of your settings and tips on a scene I did two days ago, to see what else I can get out of it.  If something good comes out of it I'll post it, if not, well probably ask for more advice

As for glass, yeah it's a real headf***....I've realized that with some light fixtures that include glass, I use a texture glass material like lines, and then in general properties make it metallic with settings like 30% specular and 40 or 50% roughness...and it comes out I'd say in some instances well...but obviously for windows or cabinet glass you cant use that....so yeah unless somebody invents some exemption to how to apply transparency and use some other settings I'm afraid we are all stuck with bad looking glass

On 9/29/2018 at 6:24 PM, TheKitchenAbode said:

Here is the result after adding additional furnishings and decorative elements. All models are CA with the exception of the Edison light bulbs in the island pendants which are from 3D warehouse.

 

 

I wanted to first of all say wow amazing result!!! 
Second, could you tell me which hardwood floor you are using and the settings used in the pbr?  Also same goes for the kitchen floor?

Well in that case, wherever you want the shadows to be less apparent, place some added lights, play around with height and lumens, turn off shadows, and when you have the camera set up, in light set choose new, name it whatever, turn on those added lights and see what happens

my bad, it was a bad extract with rar, now I got the plan, still the same question remains, are  your exterior lights supposed to just limit sun shadows to brighten certain areas, or are you going for a darker scene?

29 minutes ago, AlvarD said:

I'm trying to follow the suggestion of adding 3D external lights to lighten the shadows on exterior PBR scenes, but I must be doing something wrong as the additional 3D lights I added don't seem to make a difference, no matter how strong I make them. I currently have the sun set to 26,000 lux and have tried various 3D light intensities up to 40,000 lux, but the I still get the dark shadows from the sun.

 

I have attached the PBR render and the plan. 

 

Thanks much! 

 

Test plan.zip

I downloaded your file but do not see the plan once the rar file has been extracted?  If you give it a look over and send it again, I'll gladly give it a go. 
Plus first question, is your goal a night/evening scene with external 3d lights, or are you talking about a daytime scene?

10 hours ago, cv2702 said:

Absolutely!  Especially the first one (for me)

 

Puzzled by the strong light reflection off the ceiling on #2 ?

 

Thank you for the comments!

As for picture #2, the light that is heavily reflecting or shinning onto the ceiling is the same exterior type ambient light I used in #4.  I guess i forgot to turn it off or lower its lumens, they're supposed to be just exterior lights that make the house shine )

Definitely liking it more than raytrace, not just due to the fact that I'm saving countless hours of raytrace time, but the end result tends to be better in most cases once you get the hang of pbr settings and how to manipulate the lights and materials properly....still a learning curve ahead but so far i'm satisfied and so are clients!

****edit

Only issue I take with PBR is that glass has no realistic texture, nor does water....with water you can work with it kind of, glass is a whole other mess though...which it would do the trick like it does with metals

Some pbr exteriors and covered porch

I clicked the link and not sure but is the laptop 2700$???? If so, you're better off getting a gigabyte aero 15x....

yeah I'm a goof ball....I played around and found the same settings, I mistook standard view for pbr  Thank you thought for your help!

So...embarrassed to say this, but I screwed up...Somehow my library catalogs ended up being on top of the screen instead of being to the right...and for the love of god I couldn't figure out how to reset it manually...so I reset the toolbars to default....
Previously when I would scroll through materials the preview dialog would show them in PBR view...now it's vector or standard, and I don't see the option to have it show in PBR again....and I would love to get that back...any ideas?

I have solved the issue, I fooled around with hotkey settings and applied functions to both backspace and delete, and the problem has gone away.  On a side not I'm happy to see wolf/sub-zero have finally joined the chief wagon, I remember sending them emails as many did to get them to do it.  Thanks again guys for all the help!

Yeah I agree with cv2702, it doesn't happen right away, sometiimes after 10 minutes other times after an hour of working on a project.  Glennw, I checked my hotkeybs dbx and seems I had nothing assigned to close all views, I will try to assign backspace and see maybe if that will leave the delete button alone...if not I guess I'll just patiently save close and reopen....

Bugs persist in all versions, I've had bugs in X8 where for example ray traces were going good, and then I add a couch, ray trace and none of hte lights work, the whole scene is as if it's dark and has black squares all over the place...I delete the newly added piece, problem persists...but here's the kick...only in that room, all other rooms trace normally...luckily I always save multiple copies so I had to go back and ray trace that room without that addition...and the question is, if it was that one chair how could it **** up the scene soooo bad? I made it matte just to make sure it wasn't hte properties...yet and still nada...so yeah bugs always come about

Thank you for all the replies!  Bugs persist in every system and app sadly, and I guess I'll be waiting for updates.  For example on a recent win10 update, all of a sudden a previously non-existent drive showed up and always says its low on memory (it's a hidden partition of drive C with a backup of win10, or so I think), but it was never visible until an update happened...So **** happens, I guess i'll just wait it out.

Nope checked everything from macro (which I dont use) to ht keys...tried the previous version of chief and both keys work fine...go back to the newer and boom pain in teh ass...

3 minutes ago, Alaskan_Son said:

Might sound like a silly question, but just in case...

 

You do realize that backspace and delete are 2 different keys right?

Of course I do what kind of a question is that? )  We can agree that they both can serve the same purpose right?  I know when you type you usually use backspace etc, but previously in chief both of them would do just fine to delete an object or light or anything...now it doesn't matter which I press, each time all views close and it asks me whether or not I want to save?  I tried a search and saw back in 2006 somebody had a similar dilemma but nobody really answered

So Chiefers good day to all!  Something interesting has been happening to me lately, been doing some x10 playaround, and whenever in plan view or 3d view, whatever I choose and want to delete, well...I press as per usual the delete key or backspace, it closes the views and asks me if I want to save the file???  Checked my hotkeys, nothing....funnily enough when I choose an object and second click, it shows me that deleting = del???  Any advice?