TheKitchenAbode

1 minute ago, Chopsaw said:

 

Not so sure that is entirely true Graham, the Default Lighting White does behave differently than the Lighting White.

Agree, there are a number of factors that will effect a materials emissive appearance/behavior. Color, transparency, texture and if the material itself is being additionally lit by another light source.

24 minutes ago, gpenelton said:

I'm afraid you lost me Graham. Are you saying that I can't have my light fixture react the same way as the stock CA fixtures?

No, just that a materials emissive property is independent of the light, it does not turn on or off when you turn he light on or off. There are times when it may appear as such but that is because the light fixtures actual light source is reacting with the materials emissive setting.

Emissive is independent of the light, it's a material setting that makes it seem as a light source. The only way to turn it off is to open up the light bulbs material DBX and reduce it or set it to zero.

That can be a problem with PBR. The other room does not have a light in it and PBR at times sees the door as being lit according to that room versus the main room. Try placing a light in that room to see of it corrects the problem.

Not familiar with those messages but I believe after you have the successful installation notification you should do a full reboot of your system before opening up X12. They do post installation instructions in the download window in your digital locker, might be worth a read to make sure you are not missing an important installation step.

3 hours ago, Kbird1 said:

If you had SSA but it is not current , they used to have a forgiveness period to reinstate it , but that may not apply now X12 has been released, you'd have to talk to Sales to get the correct info....

 

M.

Good point. I had this situation several years ago and they did some form of prorating of my SSA so I could upgrade at a lesser cost.

No you do not need SSA but the cost to upgrade will be higher. With SSA you would have already paid for the upgrade cost.

Chad - you mentioned that you could not get my suggested exterior light to work. This should not have been an issue as it's just one area light with shadows turned off. Was thinking about this and by any chance in the lighting DBX do you have lights set to automatic, if so then that may be the issue. Set this to Default Set as from my experience exterior placed lights are not recognized when using the auto setting.

1 hour ago, Electromen said:

Can you explain more about setting up a Ram Drive in CA ?  How it's done

Not certain that a Ram drive will do much in respect to undo/redo. I looked into this about a year or so ago and could not quantify any noticeable benefit. Rene uses a Ram drive but this from my understanding is primarily for library items, models and textures. Here, one may see a benefit if you frequently access the library and have very complex models and high resolution textures.

The last time I looked into the undo/redo I was not really able to identify anything significant in respect to the file system or access time. What I did notice was that, depending on the undo/redo operation, it could necessitate a full model rebuild and this was where the bulk of the time was consumed, not the actual file reading time. When I looked into the number of undo's (1-50) I could not find anything that could explain why setting a lower number of undo's would have any significant affect as once an undo file is created it just sits there like a dormant file and is only accessed if you undo far enough where it needs to be accessed. As these files are stored in an dedicated directory the fact that 50 files may need to queried to find the right one should not be very time consuming, it's not as if 1000's of files need to be searched. Also, this directory is emptied/flushed out frequently and when the plan is closed so it never contains more than the undo limit. When I looked at the actual file sizes in the undo folder they did vary drastically, however even the largest file should only take a fraction of a second to load when I accounted for disk read/write times. Not saying that there may not be something going on, just that I could not find it and could not see any appreciable performance difference that I could directly associate with undo/redo file accessing at the disk level.

I can only suggest that if one feels the undo/redo is impacting on performance then try reducing the number of undo's to say 10 and see if there is a noticeable difference, you could reduce it again to say 5 and check it again. When doing this just make sure to execute the exact same CA function and then undo for each situation as undo times will vary significantly depending upon what needs to be undone.

2 minutes ago, tommy1 said:

My new laptop has this feature and my raytracing is a lot faster than what I used to have but probably not due to the RTX card.

The improvement you are seeing will be due to your CPU's higher core count. With CA's Raytrace if you double the cores the time to trace will be cut in half. To take advantage of the RTX cards built-in raytrace requires the rendering program to be specifically programmed. There's likely lots of future potential here but even the gamming industry which this was designed for is slow in changing over to this.

It's my understanding that CA's Raytrace can't utilize this new RTX raytracing feature.

If you could post a pic or two of your current renderings it would help to see what might be going on, or better still, the plan. Reflections in PBR can be challenging and the results disappointing without some additional material property manipulation and possibly the inclusion of some strategically placed lights.

Just a side note before changing the lights position. When I opened up my camera in the provided plan and opened the adjust lights DBX the setting in there was 8 lights, this will restrict the number of lights used to 8 regardless of how many lights are turned on in the actual light fixtures DBX.

Ok, just took a look at it. The fixture needs to be moved a bit higher, the lights are actually inside the crown molding and with shadows turned on the light is being blocked. I think that should resolve the problem, did on my system.

Not on my main system but might be worth checking either the Camera DBX or Adjust Lights DBX to make sure enough lights are assigned. If on Auto up the number of lights to say 100 or 200. You can also set the lights to use the default set and it will use all of the lights in the set that are turned on.

Chad, if you check Rene's signature I believe he has included a link to many textures and models he compiled for use in CA's PBR when it was first launched. You should find these very useful and you can examine them to help in understanding the techniques Rene used to improve things. There's no doubt that all is not perfect in CA PBR land, there's some quirky unexpected lighting behaviors, textures that are not properly tuned for best performance and models that are just too basic amongst many other things. This unfortunately makes the front end learning process difficult and challenging while you try to sort things out. Even so, there is ultimately a practical limit to how much time and effort one is willing to put into this and how good of a render CA's PBR can produce given the utmost effort. Each individual must make this decision depending upon their individual needs and available time, there's always numerous other third party rendering engines out there that may be more suitable and much more capable.

If your decision is to persevere with CA's PBR then all is not lost, as you refine your lights, textures, materials and models these can be saved to your library so they are ready to use in future scenes, so getting from point A to B becomes much faster and simpler. Like most CA features/functions, there are limits to what they can do and there becomes a point where you made need to resort to some unorthodox approaches and methods to get what you want. For example, the wall and material region tool is a great feature until it comes to outside and inside corners, there's no ability to break a region like a molding poly line and just wrap it around the corner and continue on. Depending on the material regions structure things can look really odd at these corner intersections, the only solution is to resort to some other method to fix this up, maybe a molding tool, psolid or custom symbol. PBR has it's own issues and requires a similar approach when it just won't automatically do what you want it to do. There are just times in CA, despite any controversy surrounding the technical premise behind these workarounds, that it comes down to whether or not it works.

I believe this is the type of reflection you are looking for. Sorry for the static pics, four shots at different angles, the counter top reflection remains intact in the backsplash and the backsplash reflections persist in the counter top. Under cabinet puck light reflections in counter top change more dramatically as camera moves, most evident in 4th & 5th pic. Everything seems in general to follow the rules, the further away the reflected object is from the reflective surface the more it changes as the camera revolves/moves around. Reflections from surfaces/objects closer to the reflective surface move less or appear almost static.

No problem, always have Global Illumination checked. I've never have had Texture Compression checked.

Pleased it worked out. That's the only item in troubleshooting, the Use Enhanced Lighting should be checked but the box will be greyed out. Also make sure in the actual PBR Rendering Technique DBX that Improve Light Quality is checked.

Under Preferences, Render, Troubleshooting, make sure Use Global Illumination is checked. If this is off then things will look like a standard camera view.

What exactly is not working when you try to PBR. Does the camera open? Missing materials or textures? Blank screen? Changing the drive should have no impact on PBR unless your catalog files/textures are not in the proper folder. This however would also affect other camera views, not just PBR.

Just a demonstration as to how impactful the sun can be. This scene has no active lights, everything is off.

Notice how drastically everything changes, colors, shadows, reflections, textures, visual sense of depth, background.

This is also an example concerning when to adjust materials. If you had the first scene displayed and attempted to correct it by playing with the materials you would likely end up with a big problem once you added the sun. You need proper lighting to see what the material really looks like, then and only then should you tweak the material.

Sun Off

Generic Sun Turned On, 25 Lux

3 hours ago, Designer1 said:

Graham,

 

Thanks for all the additional examples.  Im finding your points and descriptions very good, better then watching some of the chief videos.  I think coming from a users standpoint you use the PBR regularly and have clearly mastered the tool to get the desired results.  I will try using your method of lights higher up and add a few.  I think your right about adding a light per shaded tree, that would be hard to get it to look very even given the size of the tree and the shadow.

 

Thanks for the additional examples.  I feel like were all at a great tutorial!

Pleased you are finding this thread of interest. As you can see, there are differing opinions as to what is going on in PBR so you will need to decide for yourself as to which direction to go. I believe there is somewhat of an opinion that I'm using non traditional methods to obtain the PBR results as demonstrated in some of the renders I post. Please be assured that this is not the case. I use the generic sun in a fixed position, adjust intensity and maybe a slight colour. My primary interior lighting is a recessed light that has one additional light source added to provide some shadow control, intensity, angle and drop rate are adjusted. In most scenes these are the only source of lighting, I rarely use area lights and when used they are usually to deal with exterior shadow control. Materials are standard CA, most adjustments are just roughness, color and diffusion. I do not make special material exclusive maps, if I need some bumping I just copy the texture map and paste into the bump map box. Most models are just CA library items and a few are from 3D warehouse, the only alteration I might make is the angle degree in the symbol DBX. That's about it, no magic, no smoke and mirrors.

The only problematic material when PBR'ing is glass. The CA default glass material and property definition does not work, both Rene and I posted a year or more ago a few material alternatives that work fairly well, suggest searching the forum and uploading these. They do at times need some adjustment depending upon your lighting, usually just changing the texture size and rotation angle will do the trick.

The biggest challenge is getting everything properly balanced and when things do not look as expected understanding what needs to be adjusted, is it the lighting or the material. My recommendation has always been to ignore materials, get the overall lighting correct/balanced and then adjust the materials so they look as you want them to under those lighting conditions. Keep in mind that lighting has a more global effect, if you use this to make a specific material look good it will also change how all the other materials will look that are in the lights path, you may fix one material but it will likely be at the expense of other materials, could end up just going around in a circle.

This PBR just uses the generic sun and a few recessed light fixtures. No Photoshopping other than adding my logo.

2 hours ago, Designer1 said:

Thanks Graham!  I deleted the texture map but then the really cool texture was deleted and I wanted that.  So what I ended up doing is using some of your recommendations on our other PBR post to change the lighting a bit and when sunlight hits the flooring it makes the floor appear to be more matte finish.  So, even here in this example of flooring your right about the PBRs ever changing effects on materials in a rendering.  Im just glad I was able to achieve both keeping the texture and getting it to appear more matte then shiny.

 

Thanks for the reply!

The roughness map is different from the texture, it just impacts on the surface appearance, shiny, matte, reflective. If you remove this then you just need to use one of the other methods/controls as made available depending on the Material Property type such as general or polished.

Not certain what you are referring to as ever changing effects on materials. If for example you are referring to the fact that the floors reflectivity changes as you reposition the camera then yes it will, just as it does in real life if you as the observer move around in the room. Also, as in real life this type of reflectivity is primarily the result of the sun, it's intensity,  the angle at which it strikes the floors surface and the angle at which the reflective light is received by the observer. As the sun is the primary light contributor here then the % and position of the glazing is a significant part of the equation as it will dictate the amount of light entering the room. Another item of consideration is if you are using the generic sun there is the option to have the sun follow the camera or remain fixed. If it follows the sun then things will change as the sun moves with the camera, if fixed then things will change according to just the cameras movement.

I believe that most of this reflectivity controversy is primarily driven by the understandable desire that reflectivity be fixed/static and as such the surface will exhibit the same degree of reflectivity regardless of the lighting conditions.and camera view position. Apologize for continually referring to real life, but in real life the only thing that is fixed is the materials "potential" to reflect, it will only do so under the right lighting conditions and observer point of view.

More than welcome. Once that is under control I think you are going to have a nice Raytrace, just make sure to run enough passes to clean up the noise.