TheKitchenAbode

Might be more concerned that those asphalt shingles might start to soften as you get closer to the sun.

5 hours ago, Designer1 said:

Can anyone give me any lighting advice on how to lighten up the pitch black shadows under the island?  I was also looking at how the recessed lights don't lighten up the ceiling as well as they do in a raytrace either... so Im trying to experiment with different lighting to try and get this to look as realistic as possible.

 

This is my first PBR interior rendering.  I can see the benefits and the challenges that everyone was talking about earlier and it does take some getting use to. 

From my experience I approach this in stages, first to tackle the sun, then the most dominant light fixture(s), followed by the next lights. Once everything looks half decent then I work on tweaking the materials. I will just address the sun in this posting.

Starting with the sun. Have at least one light fixture in the scene(room), turn it off. You need this to override CA placing a generic light source in the scene. Open up your PBR Camera, ignore the fact that it will probably look terrible. Open up the PBR DBX and set Camera Exposure to 1(max) and Brightness to 100%. Again ignore how bad it may look. Now open up the Sun DBX, if the scene is way too bright then reduce the sun intensity. If you have a background then the sun intensity is going to be determined by how you wish the background to appear through the windows, ignore the interior.

Once the background is to your liking then adjust the suns angle to get your desired direct light effect through the window(s). It's most likely at this point that your background will look decent and also the direct light patch, but the room is likely to be very dark. The first urge is going to be to turn on interior light fixtures to brighten up the interior, don't do that. If you think a bit about how the current PBR scene looks and how it should look in real life given the outdoor brightness and level of glazing you have to conclude that somethings not correct. In real life the interior should be much brighter and this should be as a result of only the sun. There are two components to the sun, direct light and indirect light, the bright(er) spot on your floor from the window is the direct light component, what's not showing properly is the indirect light. Unfortunately in CA there is no direct way to adjust the ratio of the suns direct and indirect component, it's fixed. Yes, you could just crank up the sun but this will then overexpose the background, make the direct light from the window overblown and introduce a strong color cast from the background into the interior, the results can be outright ugly.

There must be another solution and fortunately there is and it's actually very simple, "Materials Emissive". This materials property imparts to a material the ability to act like a light source, I think of it more as the ability to control a materials luminosity. Just some caution here, use extreme caution when setting emissive levels, and only do this on materials where needed. When using this to deal with the overall interior ambient there are really only 3 surfaces involved, ceiling, walls and floor. Another cautionary note, the larger the surface the greater the effect is for any given emissive level setting. To begin with, I usually adjust the largest surface which is the walls, open up the wall Define Material DBX, make sure the  Material Class is set to General, emissive is not available for any other class of material. Use a very low emissive setting, I usually start with 0.01, make sure to Tab before pressing  OK otherwise the setting may not stick. If too bright or the wall surface looks too fake or cartoonish then reduce the emissive level, if everything is still too dark then increase it, just use small value increments. In many situations the walls are the only item that needs this adjustment, If you need a bit more but the walls are at their limit then switch to the ceiling and make some adjustment to it. Keep in mind that this has it's limitations, unlikely to have the perfect sunlit interior but it should be good enough to start working on your other lights.

There are of course other techniques using area lights but the above approach is straight forward and fast.

Hope this proves to be of help.

Interior with Sun only adjusted so background looks correct through windows. Sun Intensity 10.0 Lux.

Same Interior as above but wall material has emissive set at 0.05

How it would look if I just kept cranking up the sun to brighten the interior. Background overexposed, significant color cast.

Unfortunately not, the brick and mortar are not independent of each other, a texture is just a pic and within CA the only option is to use the blend color with texture but this will affect everything, the brick will also change. The only way would be to load the texture into Photoshop and manipulate it there and then save it back to your textures for use in CA.

The problem with using a 3D molding is not only the struggle to get the basic shape in all the right planes but you can't rotate the molding as you match the ceiling slope. You would need to do this on the horizontal moldings. CA has added some ability to do this but from what I see it only allows the molding profile to be rotated in 90 degree increments.

17 minutes ago, kwhitt said:

I've got a 12/12 tray ceiling to which I want to apply a base cap molding - see attached.  I have tried using a 3D molding polyline drawn in an elevation view and rotating.  Doesn't work.  Could anyone tell me how you would go about doing this?  Thanks, Kevin

I would use a molding polyline, shape it as a Trapezoid, then convert to a symbol and then rotate to match ceiling slope.

5 minutes ago, StepOneDesign said:

lyThanks Kitchen Abode.

So basically - no shortcuts per se is what I am hearing.

L

 

Depends on what you consider a short cut. Based on your first sample pic you could likely do that with a single cabinet. 3" depth, shaker front panel door and a base molding all done within the cabinets DBX. 3 actions is not bad

There are likely 4 or more methods you can use to create this. Which one you choose depends on whether or not you just need a nice visual or it needs to be accurate to how it will be supplied and installed. I always use the latter criteria so I get the order correct and can properly analyze how it will be put together on the site.

The one below uses a combination of solids, door/drawer panels, a decorative valance, base moldings and cabinets. The base corner posts were made using a main solid, the recess was done via a solid subtraction and then the inside recess detail was done with a 3D molding. The item was than blocked as it would be supplied as a factory completed component. All other items are just stand alone individual items as this is how they would be supplied and fitted.

As mentioned, in PBR only the 3D plants will cast shadows and also as mentioned those shadows can be down right ugly. They are more like silhouettes than shadows, looks like they were cut out of a black piece of construction paper and pasted on the scene. You can dilute their strength by using an area light with shadows turned off, might need to reduce the suns intensity to get compensate for the extra area lights contribution. Another thing worth trying is to open up the cameras DBX and uncheck "Raytraced Shadows", in most cases the shadows will soften with less defined edges. Not 100% as depending on the sun angle and camera angle the shadow edges can look like a saw tooth. If you are going to change the existing 2D plants to 3D plants I would suggest doing one at a time to see if you like the effect, maybe not all need to be changed.

Yes, the backdrops are very limited and there is no direct ability to adjust them. They are also detached from the model so only the model moves with the camera and the background remains in it's static position.

One method I have used is to place a very high & wide P-solid somewhere behind the model and then apply a backdrop to it as a texture. Takes a bit of playing around to get things looking proper, correct perspective, but once done it can be a big improvement. Used a google street view to capture the actual homes across the street from the one we were working on.

7 minutes ago, Dermot said:

You should not need to hit tab before hitting OK.

Thanks Dermot. I believe that confirms that what I have experienced in the materials DBX is therefore an incorrect behavior that should be reported to Tech.

3 minutes ago, Dermot said:

Please be sure to always report any problems like this directly to our tech support team.  Don't just discuss these things on the forums or we may never hear about them.

 

And just as an FYI, hitting tab to update a control and change focus to the next one is standard Windows behavior and has been that way since as long as I can remember.  We generally don't try to document standard Windows behaviors since this would make the manuals much longer.

I understand but my purpose in discussing this is to confirm that what I'm experiencing is actual a problem worthy of reporting versus just something that I'm not doing correctly or just misunderstanding.

Aware that Tabbing is a standard means/method to cycle through the different entries in the Dialog as an alternative to moving the mouse and left clicking. What's being discussed is the need to Tab if one is just changing the data in one field before pressing OK or if Tab needs to be pressed after the last data entry when multiple entries are made before pressing OK.

Just checked out the Roof Plane DBX and there is no requirement to press "Tab", just enter a new setting for pitch, baseline, etc and press OK, changes are applied without having to update the dialog box first.

Just now, Alaskan_Son said:

 

I get it.  I'm just suggesting that it's good practice whether its written anywhere or not.  And by the way, they do touch on the behavior and recommend it in a number of places in the Help files and in the Tutorial Guide.

No doubt and I did just find some articles that mention "Press Tab to Update Dialog". At the end of the day I'm just suggesting that Chief should somehow make things like this more obvious, especially for less knowledgeable users. In my example concerning the materials DBX, a user changing the emissive setting and ,pressing "OK" may not realize that their new setting was not applied, they could easily assume it was, but the reason it's not showing any change is due to something else being incorrect, they then go off and start playing with the sun, other lights or other settings as they attempt to get the emissive to work, while all the time not realizing that it failed to work because the Dialog was not updated before pressing OK.

2 minutes ago, Alaskan_Son said:

 

 

 

Just as a side note, but there is still a good reason to hit tab or click on something else  in the given examples.  The preview window won't update until you do. 

Yes, I realize this is the case but using the Tab key seems to be a best kept secret. Just checking the knowledge base and there is no mention anywhere as to the need to do this. Even in articles on roofs, they state "Click OK to Close Dialog and Confirm Changes".

8 hours ago, Smn842 said:

After a lifetime of working in software I can say that's definitely a bug :-)

 

Those two examples are both up/down edit controls rather than plain edits and trying shading contrast which is the same type with a direct number change shows the same issue.

 

In general there should never be the need to do anything other than hit the OK button.  Any validation that would occur when tabbing to the next input field or delayed update of other values (such as keep aspect ratio etc) should then be applied before closing if valid.

That's also my thoughts. The fields I mentioned appear to be single independent entries, no other fields in the DBX appear to be reliant upon that fields data. I understand for example in say the DBX for roof planes, in the DBX there are 4 or 5 fields that are interdependent, the input in one field is used to compute the remaining fields and this should be seen by the user before they do a final validation by pressing OK. Even in this situation I find the approach a bit unusual as there is no oblivious indicator that additional validation is required and if so what key or button does one press to initiate validation. In other software I use DBX's will often have at least three buttons "Close", "Apply", "Cancel" and possibly a forth button "Reset". This type of DBX nomenclature is very familiar and obvious to even the least experienced user. CA on the other hand uses "OK" and "Cancel", as far as I'm concerned "OK" means "OK", by pressing this I'm telling CA to take my input and proceed, not ignore my input and close the DBX. If CA wishes to keep the "OK" then when I press "OK" it should, if an entry requires but has not been validated by some other means such as "Tabbing" pop up an additional box with an option such as to "Close without Updating" or "Update and Close".

I understand the point being made about the tab key but then why is it only some of the time?

3 hours ago, Doug_N said:

Thanks for the update Dermot.   It is gratifying to see that CA are monitoring the forum and paying attention, jumping in when a simple post can clear up a ton of misunderstanding.  Well done.

The provided explanation is not entirely correct. Yes they put it back in the software but not back in it's original place. It has been removed from it's original menu location and relocated to the background. If you wish to have this tool back you now need to use customize toolbars and find it. Had it been put back in it's original menu location no one would have been the wiser.

3 minutes ago, rgardner said:

I noticed that when I started with x10 and got in the habit pretty quick of hitting tab as it always makes it stick.  I believe it is the whole undo/save issue that was talked about in the cabinet dbx thread the other day.  It's chief's way of saving us if we make a mistake.

That would be understandable if they were consistent. In the materials DBX all other entries will stick by just pressing OK, no need to tab. Why just these two?

5 hours ago, glennw said:

I think it was because tech support was getting too many calls about this tool.

When you use perspective crop mode, the camera stays in the one spot and the view is graphically cropped.

This means that if you send that view to layout the full view gets sent, not the cropped view.

I don’t have access to Chief at the moment, but I am pretty sure that is correct.

Maybe so but they should fix that not remove the tool. The main issue is that it's the only camera view function that allows you to get a decent view in a small room.

How do you get a full screen view using any other camera mode/setting?

Just now, DG1949 said:

Does that even still exist? I searched high and low, and finally gave up looking for it. 

Yes it still exists but they have changed the Icon and relocated it, took me a while to find it. It's now bundled with 2 other camera save functions in a drop down menu.

Just now, Ridge_Runner said:

I noticed this sometimes in X11 also. Just entered the number, tabbed, and moved on when it happened; it always seemed random.

Never noticed this before but in X12 it happens all the time with those two settings. I use these settings all the time and never noticed it in X11.

If you qualify for the X12 version you can create curved soffits using the new Tray ceiling tool. If not, you can use a P-solid and then place it up to the ceiling or as Eric suggest you can use a molding line. With the molding line you can stack different profiles to create varied shapes.

Has anyone else noticed this. For example, if you open up a Materials DBX and directly enter a number and then press OK the entry is not retained and the previous entry remains. So far I have noticed this for two entries in the Materials DBX, one is when setting the scale for a bump map and the other is when setting emissive. To get the entry to stick I have to click on something else and then press OK.

1 minute ago, Ridge_Runner said:

Agree totally. I, too, use the crop tool like Chris, especially for exterior perspective shots. Yes, it sometimes drives me crazy, but it is still a functional tool to me. I think this type of thinking on CA's part is why some get frustrated with CA's "improvements" - sometimes they are, sometimes they aren't, as far as the user base goes.

Agree, they also changed the icons for saving camera views and editing the active camera, can barely make them out, little tiny camera with a tiny disc and pencil. Don't get me started, downloaded X12 Beta and so far, at least concerning the tools I use, I'm not impressed. Just wait until you try out the so called new ability to edit p-solids in all views, need to take a few more blood pressure pills before taking another look at it.

Me too, I use this camera view setting and was surprised to see that it had been removed from the standard menus. Found it and put it back. Yes it can go a bit wonky at times but if this was the basis for removing tools then half of the tools in Chief would need to be removed. Also found the old copy and paste in place tool and also put it back, use this all the time.