TheKitchenAbode

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.

3 hours ago, Alaskan_Son said:

 

This is a surprising statement.  I couldn't disagree more.  Chief's PBR treats lights somewhat accurately as it appears in  and affects adjacent rooms, but in the current room, it always uses some predefined baseline and builds a sort of aggregate lighting effect around that.  This is easily demonstrated by placing 2 basic rooms side by side.  Place a window in each room, and place a door between the rooms.  Now place a 100 lumen light fixture in one room and a 2,000,000 lumen fixture in the other.  Set up a camera in both rooms and then experiment a little...

-Toggle the sun on and off

-Close the door between the rooms

-Open the door between the rooms

-Turn lights off in the rooms one at a time

 

Now change that diving wall to an invisible wall.

 

I think what you'll find is that the way both the sunlight and lighting from adjacent rooms (or lack thereof) affects its neighboring rooms is somewhat accurate, but the lighting in the room your camera is placed in is never right and definitely does not behave like light actually works at all.  My hats off to you though for the amount of time you've invested manipulating things to get your desired results. 

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.

1 minute ago, kwhitt said:

Graham - thanks for the reply.  No, I don't want all those extra lines in my plan, but was hoping to use them temporarily to apply shoe molding and an applied molding on the bottom rail.  I know this can be automated in the cabinet DBX, however, I am not happy with how some things are joining up (especially at the juncture of a blind corner cabinet).  I will have to pull them back manually from the overall outline, I guess.

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?

12 hours ago, Designer1 said:

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.

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.

11 minutes ago, Donco15 said:

Graham

Great Renders showcasing both methods.. Thanks for showcasing this to show how the same image looks completely different with the two methods.  Amazing... This is so helpful to see them side by side. The PBR version has more warmth and brings you into the photo.. This is my fav of the two... Thanks again for sharing...

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. 

3 hours ago, Designer1 said:

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.

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.

Here is an example of the jaggy/tearing. Note the left side of each window casing and the direct light outline of the sun cast on the wall.

Camera Tilt = 0 Degrees.

Camera Tilt = -2 Degrees.

What model is the graphics card and which driver version are you using? When did this start to happen? The surface book has both an integrated intel graphics chip and a discrete graphics card, are you certain it is using the dedicated one? In the Nvidia settings panel do you have CA assigned in the program field? Are all the power settings set to maximum/high performance in both the Nvidia settings and Windows power settings?

3 minutes ago, rgardner said:

 It is not quite fair to compare an Alienware laptop to a Mac mini

The comparison I posted is not to a Mac Mini. It is to a MacBook Pro with the exact same processor. The point was not to undermine Macs, just to provide some clarification as to the general misconception that Macs perform better than PC's.

Mac's and Windows offer to users two differing experiences and feature sets . It's up to each individual to decide which works best for them.

Here's an example in respect to my comments above. A recent review of a new Alienware Laptop.

"...CPU performance is excellent despite our reserves about the performance of an unlocked Core i9 processor in a thin chassis. In fact, of the twelve Core i9-9980HK laptops we've tested thus far, our Alienware comes out to be 7 to 14 percent faster than the average according to CineBench Multi-Thread tests. The 2019 Apple MacBook Pro 15 is almost 25 percent slower in multi-threaded loads even though it uses the exact same octa-core Core i9-9980HK CPU..."

Full review here.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Dell-Alienware-m17-R2-Laptop-Review-Making-Core-i9-Worthwhile.454427.0.html

11 hours ago, Designer1 said:

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 think this is a bit of an over statement. Macs use exactly the same hardware components as PC's. Any testing reviews I have read show that similar configurations perform about the same as similarly configured PC's. Macs may provide a bit more consistency as Apple controls/limits the hardware choices so those combinations might well be a bit more balanced. They do however make you pay the price for this.

With PC's you need to be more careful due to the wide range of configurations and differing brands. Some brand manufacturers are not as selective when configuring their hardware and as such their performance may not be as good. The Alienware brand is right up there in respect to quality and performance for any given configuration price point.

I've used both and I think most users of Mac's tend to associate what is actually operating system related differences as hardware differences. There's no doubt that OS is more fluid than Windows in respect to operating systems. It's a bit like having a car with a more refined suspension system, your ride is just a bit more controlled.

11 hours ago, Designer1 said:

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!

Just my method, but I do the same thing for interiors, start with the PBR camera Exposure set at max and the Brightness set at max. Typically with these settings the sun intensity will only need to be between 5 - 100 lux. I only adjust the Camera Exposure and Brightness once I have all my lights reasonably balance. Consider those controls to be more of a post rendering adjustment, similar to when you take a pic with a real camera and then use a photo app to make a few corrections.

Concerning those jaggy/torn lines, they are a bit of a problem and occur along vertical and horizontal items when the camera is on an angle. Sometimes just a slight change in camera angle can reduce or eliminate them. They can also be eliminated by saving your pic using a much higher resolution than the screens window, you can define this when exporting the image. Just a note, I have found that when saving a render at higher than the window resolution that it does not always look the same, often reflections and some other minor lighting effects come out different, you may or may not like the look.

Chad, in the rendering it does look as if the shadows have been reduced. What is the lux intensity of the sun? and what is the lumen intensity of the lights? As a guide 1 Lux = 100 lumen, so if your sun is set really high you will need to set those lights high. Usually when I do this I also adjust the sun, reduce it down as the added lights will be contributing to the overall brightness of the scene. Also, what are the PBR exposure and brightness settings? if exposure is set low, say for example @ o.18 CA from what I can tell does more than reduce the exposure as you would expect in a real camera, it seems to do some type of adjustment based on a maximum scene exposure level. If you add a light then it acts as if it reduces the other lights instead of just adding that lights light contribution. Can make it a bit difficult in my opinion. This is why I normal recommend that the PBR exposure be set at max, it seems to disengage this auto exposure adjustment, now when a light is added or adjusted you see it's effect as one would normally expect. Just keep in mind that if you set the PBR exposure to max then you will using in most cases very low Lux and Lumen intensities or your scene will be way too bright.

11 hours ago, Designer1 said:

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!

You can soften the shadows by using one or more lights placed outside with their shadows turned off. Their light will dilute the hash shadows produced by the sun, you use them as a means to control the overall ambient light. Properly placed and adjusted they can be used to not only dilute the overall shadows harshness but also to soften the shadow edges, providing a more gradual transition from shadow to non shadowed regions.

Rene, while on the gallery subject. Your images are always excellent and great to see but as you use more than one rendering engine it would be great to know what images are rendered with CA PBR and which ones are Thea.

Just now, Renerabbitt said:

I was just thinking that may be the case, thanks Graham!

Also, when I use Photoshop for the conversion I set JPG image quality to 12 max and the format option to Progressive, Scans 5. This does a very good of preserving the PNG quality.

5 minutes ago, Renerabbitt said:

I keep trying to upload to the gallery, in multiple browsers now. I keep getting this screen after processing: 

 

and then 3 images are missing and two show black screens
 

Had the same issue. The Gallery does not like PNG pics. I convert to JPG's using Photoshop and then upload.

I've not had any crashes with X12 Beta, but for reasons I can't fully explain it does at times give me the sense that somethings not quite right. For example, when PBR'ing there are numerous times when the PBR does not correctly regenerate after a change, it's as if the lights, sun or emissive materials are not being properly recognized. To resolve this I have to press F12 Rebuild several times or close out the camera and then reopen it. Also, as mentioned in a previous post some DBX entry boxes do not accept direct entries unless something else in the DBX is clicked or the Tab key is pressed before pressing OK. As I use these items all the time I'm certain something has changed versus I just didn't notice it before in X11.