TheKitchenAbode

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

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.

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.

That's what we refer to as light bleed. Make sure to have a roof and foundation with a floor in your model. If it still persists try reducing the sun intensity.

That's an extreme example, but it does demonstrate an often mentioned pet peeve I have concerning CA's approach concerning Camera Exposure. This exposure thing of theirs does not work the same as it does on a real camera. From what I can deduce, it seams to analyze the light being received by the camera, it then establishes a max pixel brightness and then adjusts everything else relative to it. As you move the camera around, the receiving light changes and the camera exposure thing kicks in and adjusts accordingly. That's why I often recommend setting the camera exposure to max., though it does not completely disengage this it does reduce its effect and it also forces one to use much lower light intensities which also helps the situation. With PBR, if you change the camera, say from one room to the other, you will likely need to adjust the PBR exposure or brightness to correct the rooms light intensity of the room you are viewing from. This is not really any different than a real camera under similar circumstances, you would stop the camera up or down, increase or decrease the shutter speed or adjust the ISO so the room you are in would not be over or under exposed. Other visible rooms beyond the cameras room would be affected accordingly. Just out of interest, one room has a light at 100 lumens, the other at 2,000,000 lumens as suggested. Placed a camera in each and ran a PBR and a Raytrace. Each scene is the same pixel resolution 1200 X 600. The Raytrace ran for 25 passes. Now I think this is an overly extreme test however the Raytrace 2nd pic. could not handle it, light bleed on the shared wall even though I have a roof and foundation on the test house. In the PBR ones I could instantly tweak the Exposure and Brightness to fine tune the scene, in the raytrace any adjustment required running the Raytrace again. Also, even after 25 passes the Raytraces exhibit visible noise, more passes would have been required to clean this up. Raytrace did a better job of exhibiting reflectivity in the glass windows, though in the bright room 4th pic it's overdone and the window looks more like a mirror. Note the door handles and shading on the doors, Raytrace struggles with the brushed aluminum handles. The Raytraced scene also exhibits jaggy/tearing in regions of very high contrast, note bottom of doors and baseboard in contact with flooring. As I have stated many times, neither CA render method is perfect and each requires the user to tweak the materials and lights in order to get the better out of the chosen render method. Ultimately it's up to the end user to decide which works best for them. PBR - Darker room looking towards/into Lighter room. Raytrace - Darker room looking towards/into Lighter room. PBR - Light room looking towards/into Darker room. Raytrace - Light room looking towards/into Darker room.

They identify the Start and End points of poly lines.

Chad - you can place the exterior light(s) locally near the shaded area if you wish. I just find that it's a b it more trying to get things right and often requires more lights, you would need to do this for every shaded are you need to reduce. Using one light placed up in the sky with shadows turned off will affect all shaded areas. When you turn off a lights shadow what you are doing is telling the light to ignore anything in it's way that would block the light from traveling any further. The light lights the objects exposed surface and then carries on to the next exposed surface and lights it, this continues on and on. As far as balancing things out and the underlying logic behind PBR, I find this to be fairly aligned to how light actually works. In respect to CA's Raytrace the biggest difference in my opinion concerns the sun, in Raytrace the sun is treated as a direct light only while in PBR the sun contributes both direct and indirect light. This makes a significant difference in interior renderings. What I dislike is the fact that there is no option in PBR to control the degree(mix) of direct and indirect light, it's fixed at some predetermined ratio. There really needs to be a mixer slider that allows us to adjust this for any given sun intensity level. Such a slider would also provide shadow control as raising the % of ambient would reduce sun related shadow depth. It does take some time and experimentation to get a handle on CA's PBR, bit now having done a lot of that I would certainly never go back to CA's Raytrace renderer. It's not perfect by any means but personally it's the better of the two choices CA give us.

They have likely included a roughness map. when these are applied the shine(reflectivity) is fixed by the map and the slider is greyed out. Just delete the map and the control will then be available.

For that then you should find Michaels video to be very helpful in making it easier to follow the cabinetry footprint with the molding polyline tool.

Note sure that is possible if the toe kick is defined/generated by the cabinet. If however you draw the toe kicks using a molding poly line then they should show. Do you really want all of those lines in your plan?

Yes, with CA's PBR the sun affects the overall interior ambient light level, this is also impacted by the % of glazing. There several ways to bring back the ambient light level, one as I previously mentioned is to add a very minor amount of emissivity to the wall and ceiling surfaces. Another is to use area point lights, usually at low intensity levels with several spread around the room. The other is to keep in mind that you can add additional light sources to existing light fixtures. For example, a default recessed light fixture has one light source, a spot light. You could add an additional light source to this with different settings than the default one to take care of other lighting needs such as shadow control and ambient light contribution. The thing is that in CA each type of light source, either spot or point, is limited in what you can adjust so it's virtually impossible to replicate(simulate) how a real light bulb actually works with only one light source.

Chad - on your added light do you have shadows turned off in the lights DBX? Turn shadows off and this added light acts to provide ambient light to the scene, the sun is the direct light from which the shadows result from, the ambient light injects light into the shaded areas and brightens them up. Keep in mind with this shadow thing that in real life the sun does not directly create shadows, shadows are actually regions lacking in light, the light from the sun is being blocked by objects. The issue we have is that in real life the light coming from the sun, though it is direct light at it's source, is altered as it hits the atmosphere and other surfaces, this creates a degree of scattered light so what we see is a mix of direct and scattered light. It's this scattered light that lightens up the darker areas. In CA we have no direct control on the sun to define the ratio of direct versus scattered light, so we need to add another light source to simulate the missing scattered light. When I add this light I treat it as another type of sun and place it up in the sky, maybe 300" or 600" above elevation 0 and in approximation to the suns position relative to the model and with shadows turned off. Essentially I have two suns, one that produces direct light(CA's sun) and another that simulates scattered light(the added light), adjusting their intensity levels(ratio) will allow you to control the shadows degree of darkness(lack of light). When doing this remember that CA adds the light contribution of each together so as you increase the added lights intensity the shadows depth will reduce but the overall scene will brighten. This needs to be countered by reducing the suns intensity to restore the desired overall scenes brightness. Once you get things close enough you can always fine tune the overall brightness with the PBR Exposure and Brightness sliders.

I'm certain that a Raytrace could also be done that also has more warmth, it's just that everything would need to be adjusted to generate that look. The biggest issue I have with CA's Raytrace is the time it takes to render, for every material or lighting change you need to run a trace to see what the effect is. In my example I had to run the Raytrace for at least 10 minutes for some of the adjustments I needed to do so my PBR would at least Raytrace. Keep in mind that the 10 minutes was for a Raytrace at only 1200 X 600 px, a larger sized scene would have taken much longer. With PBR you can work in it live so you see the effect right away and pic size does not really affect the rendering time. I'm working right now with a client overseas, they e-mail me a change and I e-mail them back 1 or two minutes later with an updated rendering. No way could this be done using Raytrace.

Chad, transitioning from CA's Raytracing to PBR'ing can be challenging as each rendering engine interprets things differently. Sun, Lights and materials in most cases need to be adjusted according to the chosen rendering engine. The example below, though extreme, demonstrates this. The first render is a PBR, lighting and materials adjusted accordingly. I sent the scene to Raytrace and as you can see it is distinctly different. Please do not interpret this as demonstrating that PBR is better than Raytrace, it's just a demonstration that things need to be adjusted to best suit the rendering method you wish to work with. PBR 1200 X 600px Raytrace 1200 X 600px, 40 passes, 30 minutes. Regardless of which CA rendering type you use, neither is perfect, they each have their deficiencies. I can only speak for myself but after spending some time with CA's PBR I can produce renderings that meet my needs far faster and of higher consistency than I was able to achieve using CA's Raytrace.

Not sure there is any automated way to address that type of issue but I believe in X12 they have added a feature where you can override a displayed dimension and type in an alternative.

Yes, I always have edge smoothing on. Just be aware that this does not happen every time the camera is tilted, it all depends upon the suns intensity in conjunction with any given tilt. So if you wish to have the tilt but are experiencing some jaggies then try increasing or decreasing the suns intensity, just might do the trick.