TheKitchenAbode

Just take two 6" width cabinets, angle them and snap the inside angle corners together they will automatically fill in to look like one unit.

Just checked, it's both. For "Glass Standard" the Index of Refraction is based on Crown Glass 1.52. You can change the type of glass and the index setting. I often use Glass Gray which is just a Reflective material with 35% transparency. With this the reflectivity can be adjusted.

Looks to me like a reflection of the room outside of the shower onto the glass. Are you using the standard glass or did you change any of it's properties?

Mick - For the Caesarstone drop the reflection down to maybe 6% and increase the roughness say 70%. Their products have an almost honed surface appearance.

It's the color of the actual light source, it's right under the light intensity % setting. The shade material should be ok as per it's original setting.

Mick - The scene is looking nice even with the lights off. Try assigning a gray scale to the wall scone lights colour say 75,75,75. That will allow you to have a low intensity % without it causing a photon mapping problem. I do this in most cases for my under cabinet lights.

Looks to be faked. The background sky is cloudy, almost stormy looking in the top scene. Just apply one of the sky backgrounds to the window glass and I'm sure you can replicate the effect.

Mick - Very low % intensity settings can cause what you are experiencing. Seems to vary according to the type of light source. I have often found that anything below 3% can cause the photon mapping to fail unless you have other active lights that are above this. One way I have been able to get around this is to change the color of the fixture to some gray scale level. This effectively reduces the light intensity for a given % level which you can then be used to extend the lower limit without setting the intensity % below a recognizable level.

Mick - I have encountered this error in the past. It seems to be related to there being insufficient light for photon mapping to function. If the scene runs with photon mapping turned off then check your light settings, ambient light and ambient occlusion to see if something is amiss. If you did not place any active lights in the scene then possibly your crash corrupted the auto generic light, if so then just place real light in the room to see if it will run.

Just something to keep in mind when setting printer margins. The majority of printers have a built-in minimum margin setting that can't be overridden by other print control software. As such when you use the print control software and set the margin to zero the printer will always inject it's own margin, this is one reason why you still need to use the fit to page control.

I assume that you are trying to create a standard flat ceiling in the bathroom versus the vault. If framing is not an issue then consider just using a 1/2" thick polysolid shaped to match the wall layout and suspend it to the desired height.

Rene - Great tip/example of how beneficial and important some post processing work can be. Much faster than trying to make these adjustments using the rendering engine. Here is a link to a great Photoshop tutorial site that describes a wide range of techniques and how to do these types of things, the instructions are well laid out and fairly easy to grasp. https://www.photoshoptutorials.ws/ Excellent point concerning the PNG vs JEPG export file format to avoid those nasty color artifacts.

I have a puck saved to my library with the symbol option set to be offset from the floor instead of the ceiling. This has resolved for me the issue of the lights not recognizing the cabinet and jumping to the ceiling.

Here is the scene adjusted for a late evening look. Added some under-shelf & range hood lights and a few garden lights, all spots. Also changed the backdrop. Once the core scene is balanced you can quickly alter it to create whatever look you desire.

Here's a prime example to demonstrate the value of some post production work. "Battle of the Renders" Competition scene, direct sun set @ 0.5, turned on the ceiling pots (6). Render time 6 minutes. Dropped it into one of my photo editors, as I have some preset configurations saved I made one click to apply, about 10 seconds. All done! Total time 7 minutes max.

Dennis - Good example of the benefit and personally the logical decision to utilize some post processing to finish off the scene. In reality this is how it's done, the renderer is just one part of the workflow process in the quest for realism just as the camera has been for decades. Rendering engines are really only a camera substitute, they are data capturing devices. This data is then moved into a data manipulator such as Photoshop. Professional photographers understand that the lighting at the time of the shoot will never be perfect so they do not focus on trying to get the perfect publication grade pic right out of the camera. Instead they use the camera to collect data about the scene through multiple shots at varied exposures, f stops, ISO, etc., each shot capturing different levels of data that would not have been capture through only one setting. Once they have this they no the camera has done it's intended job, the next step is to take this data and put it all together. For true photo realism this is the reality of what it will take and it is also the most efficient way of doing this. Trying to make the necessary final tweaks in the renderer is very inefficient as each change requires one to render the scene again to see the effect, which could take 30 minutes an hour or more. In say Photoshop changes are instantaneous, there is no waiting, you are working in on it live. If a change is too much one can simple reduce the blend % or if a change is just needed in one region of the image then this region can be easily isolated out so only it is effected versus the entire scene. You just can't make these types of adjustments in a rendering engine, if you adjust or add a light to highlight something the light will also impact to some extent on the rest of the scene and there is no way to anticipate in advance as to whether or not this side effect will be desirable. IMO, "resistance is futile", sooner or later some post processing is going to be needed if true photo realism is the objective.

In case you have been following the "Battle of the Renders" using CA Ray Trace. Here is my result straight out of the Ray Tracer, after some minor adjustments using Photoshop and the comparison Pro Photo. Straight out of Ray Tracer Some minor Photoshop adjustments Comparison Pro Photo I believe this demonstrates that the CA Ray Trace engine can in fact deliver photo realistic renderings. It should also be noted that this rendering was achieved using only basic spot lights and these lights were only adjusted for intensity, cut-off angle, drop rate and shadows on or off. All materials and models are 100% CA. Material properties were tweaked but only for diffusion, reflectivity, roughness and at times some emissivity. The Photoshop version used only basic 101 procedures, a couple of layer masks to adjust lighting in specific regions and to create the shadow effect under the cooker and one curve layer for overall scene brightness/contrast balance.

Thanks Dennis, Agree but not sure how long that would take. I'm still trying to fully determine the why in all of this. My suspicion is that these types of materials have a certain amount of reflectivity and as such a certain amount of light is trapped between the two panes in a continual bouncing back and forth. The Ray Trace engine only calculates 5 bounces and then gives up. What's curious about this effect is that normally when more than 5 bounces are need the resultant is black, not bright white. This can be seen when one places two opposing mirrors, the fifth reflected image of the opposing mirror is just black. What is also interesting is that if one uses a regular non glass material and sets it's transparency to zero you can still get this effect. I'm wondering if zero is not really zero and for calculation purposes it still being taken into consideration to some very minute extent.

Glass Speckling and Possible Control Methods I have done an evaluation on this to identify under what conditions these speckels occur and what if any methods are available to eliminate or minimize them. Glass speckling occurs when two individual glass materials or transperant materials overlap in front and behind each other and the intensity of light varies on the surfaces behind the overlapping glass portion. Variations in surface lighting in front of the glass seems to have no effect, it's the surfaces on the other side of the glass and the degree of light variance of those surfaces that impact on this speckling. The degree of speckling is directly porportional to the degree of light variance in those surfaces. The greater the variance(range) the greater the amount of speckling. To date I have not found a direct way to prevent this from occuring, it appears to be a defficiency in the Ray Trace program when dealing with light passing through two or more transparent type materials where they overlap. There are ways to indirectly affect this or minimize it, but they all come with other trade-offs. One is to just eliminate any overly bright surface variations, the less variation the less spekling. The trade of is that you will be very limited in the look of your scene behind the glass. The other method is to make adjustments using the Ambient Oclussion tool in the Ray Trace DBX. The degree of benefit will vary depending upon how severe the speckling is. Keep in mind that this is not the intended use of Ambient Oclussion and that it will effect other light properties due to it's global nature. Also, the Ambient Oclussion does not directly reduce the specking, it's just making it less obvious by altering the dark and bright pixel levels/rage. A way to envision the ambient occlusion tool is to see it like a dynamic range brightness/darkness control. The min and max determine what RGB level the darkest pixel will be represented by and the lightest(brightest) pixel. For maximum dynamic range the RGB value would be 0,0,0 for the darkest and 255,255,255 for the brightest. If one increases the minimum then you are clipping the darkest RGB value to a value greater than 0,0,0. Conversely if you reduce the maximum then you will clip the brightest pixel RGB value to less than 255,255,255. You have reduced the dynamic range. Just to clarify, I'm describing this process in a very simplistic way, the algorithms used are far more complex than just chopping off RGB pixel values, but for a general perspective my description is likely sufficient. As the degree of speckles are directly related to the dynamic range on the surfaces behind it then by using the ambient occlusion control you can reduce this dynamic range and therefore reduce the degree of visible speckels. But, the ambient occlusion is global and therefor it will affect the dynamic range of the entire scene equally. Also, clipping means that the clipped values are lost forever which will effect the data that other adjustment controls will have to work with, such as intensity, contrast, etc. With this in mind you can see the potential drawbacks if the ambient occlusion is not carefully managed. Clipping too much of the darkest regions will result in the dark regions appearing washed out and of coarse clipping the brightest may give you a dull appereance. Also, as a scene typically contains a much higher percentage of brighter pixels than darker ones there is less tolerence in the minimum setting as you just don't have too many of them that you can afford to loose. The only 100% solution is to not have overlapping glass/transperent materials. If you need the look then it will have to be done without any real overlap. This can be accomplished by having say thee indidual pieces of glass that abutt end to end. The left & right pieces will be the non overlapped portion of the pane and the middle piece will be the overlapped portion. Just change the materials property of the center panel to be a shade darker than the left & right panels. When rendered the scene behind the center panel will be slightly less bright than the scene behind the left & right panels, which represents the extra reduction in light transmission when it has to pass through two layers versus one.

The error message about your video is related to the integrated HD4000 chip, I get this on one of my systems with HD3000. X8 worked fine but X9 does not. I checked into this and it appears to be related to the version of OpenGL that your chip can support. These integrated graphics chips are no longer supported and their OpenGL version is way outdated. I think what has happened is that in X9 there are some additional render features such as bloom and ambient occlusion that can't be handled by these older chips and you either get the error message or things will not display. Maybe CA could write a test for the graphics chip series and disable the unsupported render features.

Peter - why are you running in safe mode? This mode is just for trouble shooting purposes only. When in safe mode Windows just loads the bare minimum of services needed to be operational. It is not a special high security mode and not intended to be your daily working mode.

Click on the sink, open up the symbol tool (bottom screen left). You will see offsets for the X,Y,Z. I would set them all to 0(zero) and the open up the sink DBX and set the height off of floor. The offsets are set as if the sink was being placed into a normal cabinet, I assume you are placing the sink into a custom counter top.

Just out of interest I ran this on my PC. 10 passes 1 minute 36 sec. My system specs are below, CPU has 4 cores (8 threads).

Just in case you are interested and to continue with my emphasis on lighting. Here is the fire-ice-kitchen as per CA's default settings. 26 passes 33 minutes. Here it is with my lighting technique and a minor adjustment to only the polished floor, table and stainless steel material properties. 50 passes 20 minutes. More passes in less time and improved quality.

How Many Passes Do You Need? Let's take a look at what to expect from running a high number of passes and how to determine when enough is enough. Assuming one has the lighting and materials reasonably configured there is in most cases no significant gain in running 100's of passes for hours on end. After a few passes you will likely see your trace at about 80-90% of it's ultimate quality, if not then your lighting or materials are the root cause and running significantly more passes is not likely to improve things by much. This uses the CA Sample Gallery fire-ice-kitchen Here is an example of a Ray Trace after 5 passes ( 2 minutes). After 50 passes (20 minutes). After 100 passes ( 40 minutes). After 2700 passes (18 hours). As you can see the differences are not that significant, especially once one exceeds 50 passes. What the passes are doing is some minor lighting & detail refinement and more importantly noise reduction. I have cropped out these pics so you can better see where all the action is. 5 passes. 50 passes. 100 passes. 2700 passes. Keep in mind that I am cropping in on a fairly low resolution pic for demonstration purposes, the real test is the impact of this has on the normal sized trace. Most of what is happening here is related to detail refinement and noise reduction. This noise(graininess) is predominantly related to two or three conditions, polished materials, predefined metals, situations where light has to pass through more than one transparent material such as glass and poorly lit regions. One way to address noise versus running a huge number of passes is to drop a lower pass pic into a photo editor and apply a bit of noise reduction to it. Original 50 passes. 50 passes with some noise reduction. Original 2700 passes. The 50 pass trace took 20 minutes, applying noise reduction took about 30 seconds, compare this to running 2700 passes for 18 hours. One way to judge you Ray Trace while running is to click on the + magnifying glass and double it's size, scan the trace for this graininess and when it has diminished sufficiently then you have likely gone as far as you can go.