TheKitchenAbode
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Everything posted by TheKitchenAbode
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That's just the standard Chrome Polished, material class Shiny Metal. Specular - 98% Roughness - 10% Comes out quite nice. Lighting plays an important role, I've got 88 active lights in this scene, about 35 of them are area point lights at very low intensity used to control the overall ambient lighting.
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Like any good photographer would, I used a ladder No I don't have that bump-map. I just used the texture file and set it at 0.05, probably a bit too much as it's also raising the grout on the horizontal lines. Was pleased with the hardwood, again maybe a bit overdone but it all depends on the angle of the light as to how pronounced the look is.
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Another big advantage with PBR'ing. It's much easier to be more creative with your camera view angles. As it's virtually live you can compose your shot very quickly. "What you see is what you get".
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Just an example of how fast things can get. I just pumped out these additional scenes, took about 5 minutes. If I was Ray Tracing each additional scene would have taken at least 30 minutes or more to trace.
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Thanks Mick. As expected it wasn't just "plug & play". I lost all of my calibration adjustment so I had to go through all of that again, did not pay full attention when I did a clean install of the most recent Nvidia drivers. There have been some other benefits beyond PBR'ing. My vectors and elevations are much nicer, lines are very crisp. Also, in the material definition DBX the little tea pot is far more representative, if I zoom in on it a bit I can see my material adjustments. So far I'm very pleased with the upgrade despite the price gouging.
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The scene I posted above uses the wide plank walnut flooring in the core library, have you tried it? The wall and left arm of the love seat are changing due to the sun's intensity level and angle of entry into the room. In PBR'ing the sun plays a much more important role than it did in Ray Tracing. I don't believe there are any decent video tutorials. CA has one but I certainly did not find it to be of any real value. The first scene looks to be the best one, try the walnut hardwood in that one and maybe a few tweaks to the camera exposure, brightness and saturation in the PBR DBX.
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Now with much improved computer performance PBR'ing is becoming fun to use and it seems to me that it's likely time to bid Ray Trace a "Happy Retirement". Takes a bit of time to learn the new material properties, lighting and the sun but it is well worth the investment in time.
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Thanks for the update Mark and pleased you were able to get your new Spectra working. It would have been a real shame if you were forced to work with a crippled system or had to scrap it. -
My new GTX 1060 is up and running. As predicted, my PBR generation time has dropped down to about 2-3 seconds for a scene with about 40 active lights, this is at least a 400% - 500% improvement over the replaced GTX 745. The new one also has 6GB versus 4GB of dedicated onboard memory which can handle a few more active PBR camera views before needing to use shared memory or the page file system. So far my systems limited 300 watt brick power supply seems to be handling the draw, no crashes yet. Choked on the price, about $575.00 CDN taxes in, but if it extends my systems usefulness for maybe 2 more years then it will have served it's purpose.
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Unfortunately CA is not really designed for that type of modeling, the ability to create or edit complex 3d symbols is very limited. Suggest posting some examples of the types of objects you are attempting to create as there may be methods other than the one you are using to accomplish this.
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This looks like the one I'll purchase. $489.00 EVGA GeForce GTX 1060 SC Gaming ACX 6GB (06G-P4-6163-KR) 1607 Mhz Base/ 1835 MHz Boost, 8008 Mhz Memory PCI-E 3.0 16x, DVI-D, HDMI 2.0, 3x DP They have 4 stores within a 20 minute drive and 8 units on the shelf. One store has an open box one with 10% off, that would almost cover the tax.
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They have them at Canada Computers, just a few clicks away. I've bought a fair number of items from them over the years and they have a good return policy. Their pricing is typically better than most and will also price match. The other advantage is that they have people that know what they are talking about, not like Best Buy where they don't have a clue.
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Thanks Mick. I would rather play on the safe side concerning power draw, especially with only 300 available watts. If I take the plunge, which I will likely do tomorrow, I will purchase new from a retailer so if I'm not happy I can return it and get my money back.
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Thanks Mark. I really do not want to spend more than $500 and I have an issue with my power supply. The power supply for my Alienware X51 R3 is a separate brick power cord type and it can only handle 300 watts, no way to upgrade it. From my checking around I can't use a card that draws more than 120 watts which seems to limit me to a 1060. Compared to my existing card I should see somewhere between a 400% - 500% improvement. My calculations predict that this would bring my PBR generation time down to about 3 seconds, this I can easily live with.
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My mistake on the Opaque, it looks like it is only available in standard view. I just tried changing the backdrop to a white color and it seems to work ok, sun light still enters the room. If it's a color it has the same influence on the interior as a backdrop has. Won't spend any time trying to squeeze any performance improvements out of my GTX 745. To make an impact I need at least 3 times the performance, a 1060 looks like the best option, 4 times the performance and it's power consumption is within my power supply limit.
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I believe this is also applicable to a terrain and other objects placed around the exterior. Have you tried just checking the opaque glass option in the PBR DBX, not sure if the sun still reflects on the interior with this but might be worth a try.
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Here are a series of 4 PBR's with differing backdrops. The scenes are identical except for the backdrop. It can be seen that the backdrops now have an impact on the interior, the effect is most prominent on the fridge and stove hood. Forested Snow Cover Pond & Park City View 3 Dusk Overlook
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Yes, I do have those on the Optane drive and it did make a difference.
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I just checked and my system uses DDR4 dual channel and can handle 32GB in total. Having changed the page file over to my Optane drive has made a really big difference. The bottle neck now is definitely my GPU and this is being pushed on by the number of active lights I'm using in my scenes. Before upgrading my graphics card I will take a harder look at whether or not all of the lights I'm using are really necessary. PBR'ing treats lights differently than Ray Tracing so I need to exhaust that avenue before going the money route. Appreciate the offer though, many thanks.
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From what I have tested and looking at your system specs I really do not think you will any performance issues. As far as rendering goes you still have the option to Ray Trace. The learning curve will be getting accustomed to the new material property settings and light intensity settings. Definitely takes some experimentation but as with Ray Tracing once you get a handle on them then things get a lot easier and predicable.
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They all had the sun on. I just tried it and it seems to be equivalent to one light source, so nothing to be concerned about.
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Concerning the computer performance issues I have been having. Done some further testing and monitoring and this is what's happening. My GTX 745 has 4GB of RAM and my system has 8 GB of Ram. When I run a PBR each scene takes up approximately 2GB of my video cards memory. Once I reach 3 scenes the video cards dedicated memory limit has been exceeded, it then starts using shared memory. As I only have 8GB of system memory there is not really much of it free to share with the video card. As such the system starts using the virtual memory page file on the hard disk. My main hard drive is just a standard drive so once it starts using this the necessary file swapping is slow. What I did. I have a 32GB IBM Optane card so I changed the virtual memory page file to it and sized it to 16GB. As the Optane drive is really fast the slowness resulting from the file swapping has been reduced to the point that it is not really noticeable. This has significantly improved performance across the board, flipping through windowed tabs, activating DBX's in PBR windows and PBR regeneration. Though my GPU is still being maxed out during PBR generation, it's not as bad as before. I also tested RAM consumption in respect to the number of active lights. 0 lights - 0.5 GB 10 lights - 0.9 GB 20 lights - 1.1 GB 30 lights - 1.3 GB 40 lights - 1.6 GB 50 lights - 1.9 GB There seems to be a fairly linear increase in RAM consumption in respect to the number of active lights. As can be seen, with no active lights RAM consumption is only 0.5GB and the PBR generation time is almost instant. At 50 lights the consumed RAM is now 1.9 GB and my PBR generation time has increased to about 12 seconds. Just a special thanks to Mick for his input on this subject
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Yes that can help but it only applies to changes being made in that light adjustment DBX. Even with it turned off, any changes made in the actual PBR window including a light forces an update.
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I've monitor every thing and both RAM and the Video card are real bottlenecks. With only 8 GB of RAM it starts using the swapfile when about 4 PBR windows are tabbed, then things really start to slow down. The GPU maxes out on every PBR regardless of the number of windows. I know I will need to address both of these.
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The 1060 is the max it will take but I know I will also need to up the RAM, my 8 GB is not enough. The cost for a graphics card and additional ram RAM will be about $1,000. I only paid $1,500 for the system 2 years ago. Just not convinced it's worth going the upgrade path and at the same time I don't really want to drop $3,000 or more on a new rig, especially just for this one feature.