TheKitchenAbode

Pleased that it worked out and you were able to replicate the result. Yes, lighting is very critical in how these maps perform, even the camera angle will make a big difference. This of course raises the issue that even though CA provides maps the look one will get is not guaranteed, under specific lighting the material may look great but then under other lighting conditions it could look terrible. There are many times when I have to adjust/tweak the maps for a specific view.

I've had 3 Dell systems over the years and have found them to be highly reliable, performance competitive and cost competitive to similarly configured systems. Dell is very accommodating and if you wish to have a specific brand of say graphics card you just need to talk to them. If you check out product comparison reviews most Dell systems such as their Alienware series are right up there with the best of them. At their list prices they can be a bit pricey but you just need to keep checking and sooner or later they will offer a deal that's hard to beat. You can purchase the system outright or lease to own if you prefer a monthly payment program, systems are fully warranted and you can return it if your not satisfied. Can one do better with a true custom build? I'm certain it is possible but the person configuring the system needs to be highly knowledgeable in the specific software you are using in order to make the right component choices. Unfortunately most custom builders have no experience with CA and as such I'm not sure how they can make highly specific recommendations to ensure you are getting the best performance for the dollars being spent.

Here's a screen capture of the material DBX with the settings I used. The effectiveness of the maps bump and normal are highly dependent upon how the material is lit. They work by changing how light is absorbed or reflected back in specific regions of the material to create the elusion of depth and height.

Looks correct, the difference is likely due to the lighting in my PBR. I'm not on my main system but will check tomorrow afternoon just to make sure.

I just used the one that is already assigned to the standing seam material from the library. Looked to be the same as the one you posted. I just highlighted the normal map file in the box and copied it to the bump map box.

I copied the normal map to the bump map box, set scale to 0.1 and checked "Invert". This is the one in CA's most current sheet metal material library. PBR Camera View

In respect to this. The reason things are changing when you resize the fixture is due to the fact that when resizing the fixture the position of the light source does not change according to your fixture size change, it remains in the same position as it was prior to your resize. This means that the light source may end up in the wrong position and then those fireflies can occur. Before resizing a fixture check the light data settings to see the light source offsets, then after resizing the fixture go back to the light data and reposition the light source by adjusting it's offsets.

It's an inherent issue with CA's Ray Trace engine. Those bright white speckles occur when light/reflections pass through more than one semi-transparent/transparent material. They have been nicknamed "Fireflies", search the forum for Ray Trace Fireflies and you should find some considerable discussion concerning this. If you have those lantern lights turned on then try turning them off. If you look closely at the door you can see the same issue, I believe you have a ceiling fixture just inside turned on, the light is trying to pass through the light fixture glass and then through the doors glass. As glass has a reflective property it's bouncing the light back and forth between the glass, CA's Ray Trace engine can only compute 5 bounces and then it quits and then just fills in the missing pixels.

That may not enough to ensure that the Nvidia card is being used. That setting just tells Nvidia that "if it is being used" and CA is using it then to use the settings provided by CA. To make sure your Nvidia card is always being used you need to also go to the Windows power plan and change it to "High Performance". There is also a similar power setting in the Nvidia control panel, it should also be set to "High Performance". Most of today's laptops, to maximize battery time, will bounce back and forth between the integrated graphics and the discrete video card, I don't think CA can deal with this. Only by setting everything to high performance can you be assured that only the discrete Nvidia card is being used 100% of the time.

I would exercise caution in dialing back your fan speed unless you are really certain your CPU and GPU temps are still ok. Running too hot can induce instability or a complete system shutdown. Typically the GPU fans will be the most noisy and will crank up and down according to the GPU load, mine does this all the time. Suggest downloading GPU-Z so you can monitor this to make sure your GPU is not overheating. Would also check your sleep/hibernate settings and also your Windows update settings. If Windows does an update during idle hours it does not always restore everything back to it's original state.

I'm not keeping my hopes up on this, not sure what would be involved programing wise for CA PBR to take advantage of these new Ray Tracing features. Seems to me this is more aimed at the gaming industry.

Not much benefit in using ram that can run higher than what your motherboard can handle, save the money and use it somewhere else.

Yes I monitor ram usage and my current 16gb of system ram and 8GB of video ram is more than sufficient. A complex PBR scene consumes about 2GB of video ram so my video card can accommodate about 3 active scenes before swapping with system ram. If it does swap with the system ram this is rarely noticeable, it only becomes a problem if the system ram gets used up and it starts to swap to the disk. Was doing this in the past when I only had 8GB of system ram, I upgraded to 16GB and this does not happen anymore. No point in having a bunch of unused ram, that will have no effect on PBR performance.

This is just an example to demonstrate my point. I have GPUZ up to monitor my video card and task manager running to monitor my CPU usage. I open up a PBR camera, this is a fairly complex scene so it takes at least a 60 seconds to generate. During this my CPU runs on average about 35% usage for about 50 seconds, during this time my GPU is only running at 1%. This tells me that for almost 90% of the rendering time my GPU is just sitting idle waiting for my CPU. Also, as my CPU is only showing about 35% usage it is telling me that many of the operations the CPU has to do are single threaded or only lightly hyperthreaded, so even though I have 8 logical cores they are not being fully utilized. Based on this, in order to improve my PBR times I don't really need a faster graphics card, I need a faster processor, I also do not need more cores as it is evident that the software is not written to take advantage of this. This now leaves me with only one choice, to find a processor that has a higher single thread performance than my 6700K, unfortunately when it comes to single thread performance my 6700K is right up there with the best available processors. So at this point in time there are no viable upgrade options if my objective is to reduce my PBR generation time.

In respect to CA, Quadro cards do not really provide any benefit but cost a lot more than an equivalent gaming video card. It's essentially the same when considering a consumer grade CPU versus Xeon CPU's, you will pay a premium for the Xeon with little or no appreciable performance gain. Keep in mind that Xeon processors are really just heavy duty consumer CPU's, they are designed to run flat out 24/7. With CA your CPU under most circumstances only runs maxed out for a few seconds, the exception is when Ray Tracing when your CPU may run maxed out for 20 minutes or more. What's most important is for any given budget to configure your system to achieve the proper performance balance according to the software you use. For example, if you do not Ray Trace or use other heavily threaded software then there is no benefit going core crazy, 4 or 6 hyperthreaded cores will do just fine, you will obtain greater performance by getting the highest frequency CPU versus more cores. The same goes for you video card, it needs to be matched with your CPU. Video cards do not work in isolation, they work as a team with the CPU, each has a role in the processing of graphics. The CPU must be capable of keeping up with the GPU and vice versa, otherwise one will be waiting for the other. Also, all those technical comparison reports must be taken with a good dose of caution. A reported 20% advantage seems significant but in reality it is unlikely you will notice any difference. You must also make sure that when a performance gain is stated that the area of performance is related to your specific software, if not then it is really meaningless.

Thanks Michael. The techniques I am using are very similar to those used and demonstrated by Rene in Scotts PBR session. Rene did a great job highlighting the important techniques concerning lighting and material properties that can be used to improve the quality of PBR output. There is another aspect to all of this that is very difficult to explain/describe in absolute terms. How a material looks is not just in accordance to it's property settings, it's appearance is directly tied to the intensity and type of light(direct/indirect) that it is exposed to. For example, a material that you give a level of reflectivity to can only reflect if there is light striking it at the proper intensity and angle to be reflected, when setting a materials reflectivity you are really only giving it the ability to reflect. The same holds true for all of the other material property settings, the potential to appear rough, the potential to appear a certain color the potential to exhibit ambient occlusion. This is why it is so important to first get your lighting properly set and balanced, each type of light sun, spot or point contributes varying degrees of direct and indirect light. Only once you are satisfied with the overall lighting should you then start reviewing the materials and adjust their properties so they appear proper under those lighting conditions. It must also be recognized that CA's PBR feature is not as sophisticated as other dedicated PBR programs so there is a limit as to how far you can push your material properties to get the look you want. More sophisticated programs allow you to force a material to appear a certain way regardless of what the lighting dictates. It's what we do in Photoshop, the pic straight out of the camera often looks dull/flat so in Photoshop we crank up the color saturation, adjust the exposure and gamma, add some sharpening and more, the resulting pic is now often greater than what real life would dictate it to be. Achieving a level of this is not impossible in CA's PBR but it's very challenging as it does not have these built-in control features.

Thanks Scott. And for those Dog Lovers.

Forgot to add Kitty.

Take your PBR to a new level of realism with some simple Photoshop crops. Took about 10 minutes. Before After

Take the light symbol and convert it to another symbol but this time make it an electrical symbol, select advanced options and make it a light. That way you can add lights to it just like any other light fixture.

Please accept my sincere apology for my no show. I had to squeeze in a last minute client meeting that went way over it's anticipated time frame. Added to this I for some reason thought the time difference was 4hrs versus 3hrs. Hopefully, Scott recorded the session and I will be able to catch up on the topics and techniques. As I mentioned earlier on I'm in the process of consolidating my methods and techniques and will post this within a week or two. If possible Rene I would like to bounce this off of you prior for your input and guidance. Sincerely, Graham

Will definitely be more than pleased to share the methods I use. I'm just in the process of compiling most of what I have into a single plan that one can upload and extract the items of interest. Might be a week or two before I have this ready to post. Possibly, after I do this it might be worth having another workshop and I can go through the plan and explain the what's and why's.

It is GPU based so your graphics card is the most important component for PBR. I use a GTX 1060 and most PBR's will run in 5 - 15 seconds. Times will vary depending on the number of lights, number of surfaces and the surface properties.

Yes, that is correct no active lights and no sun. Also you don't need to apply emissive to all materials, major surfaces alone will likely do the trick. In that scene I believe only the ceiling, walls, floor, trim and counter top were adjusted. I used very low numbers, in most cases around 0.02. In general the larger the surface the lower the number. Worth a try.