TheKitchenAbode

6 hours ago, Designer1 said:

Thanks so much Graham for figuring this out!  Geez now that youve found out what makes the PBR so unpredictable Im definitely going to spend more time looking at changing room labels if I come across this again.  The other strange thing is I never thought that the column facing a certain direction would ever make a difference given its identical on all four sides.  This is another items Im going to be paying attention to as I didnt think it made any difference.

 

I appreciate everyones time and help...thank you!

You're welcome. Just a note concerning rooms, I would not delay in having your rooms properly assigned to only when you encounter a problem. Rooms are fundamental to CA's operation and not having them properly defined could lead to all kinds of unpredictable behaviors. In your situation the problem likely relates to how CA treats the sun, the stairwell was defined as an interior room open below, the 2nd floor was defined as a porch, suspect CA saw the former as being inside the structure while the later as being outside.

Another note concerning your plan, I noticed that you had several exterior walls on the 2nd floor that were rotated so the exterior side was on the interior and some of your walls where at different heights. These are also examples of things that can result in unpredictable behavior, as an example, when CA auto builds roofs it does not use the actual wall height for positioning it, it uses the height as defined in the rooms DBX, not the individual walls.

Keep in mind that PBR'ing is mainly a final rendering process and it requires all the primary rooms, roofs and foundations to be in place and properly defined for it to generate predictable result.

On 4/15/2019 at 2:57 PM, hikerj said:

Can anybody tell me why I get ray traces that are really grainy?  I can't find a topic on this.  I am using X9 on a mac. 

Posting a sample pic would be most helpful. There are several reasons why your Ray Traces might exhibit excessive graininess, the most common is due to abnormally high light intensities and/or many highly reflective surfaces. A sample pic would likely indicate which of these is happening.

As standard practice your model should always have a roof and a foundation with a floor. Without this there is a high likely hood that you will experience what we refer to as light bleed, usually evidenced by grainy bright areas along ceiling and wall intersections and floor and wall intersections. In this situation the sun light is bleeding through to the interior. If there is still evidence of this after placing a roof and foundation on your model then it's most likely the sun intensity is way too high.

Grain can result from too many reflective surfaces including polished. In most cases they will clean up but it may take many passes and what's worse is as reflective surfaces increase your Ray Trace time per pass will also increase.

8 hours ago, CARMELHILL said:

 

I was watching a PBR Youtube video and I could have sworn they said check the Improve Lighting Quality box, I think by Rennerrabit. Why do you say "uncheck"?

I just suggested it because it does at times eliminate that problem where one room shows a distinct difference in lighting as we have been discussing. Personally not sure why they have that option, if I'm PBR'ing why would I want "poor" light quality, I always have it checked to on.

Chief has two different rendering methods, the first being Ray Trace and another newer method called Physically Based (PBR). Ray Trace uses the CPU and will scale according to the number of cores your CPU has, when Ray Tracing all available CPU cores should show 95%-100% usage, the GPU will show very little usage. The Physically Based renderer uses both the CPU and GPU, the CPU portion is not fully hyperthreaded so it will not use all of the CPU cores for most of the operation. After the CPU has compiled things your GPU will crank up, likely 80% or higher to finish off the render.

32 minutes ago, robdyck said:

This behavior is common when toggling between different plan views. Chief gets bunged up and can't remember what plan view is being used for what, and then starts to apply the settings from one plan view to another. To resolve that issue: from the project browser, just double click the plan view you wish to use, even if its already open, and that will reset it.

Chief has other issues with plan views holding their settings. I'm sure other users have noticed that a plan view may 'jump' to a different default setting when something is imported into the plan using a layer that might not be on in that view. 

 

Thanks for the tip.

Yes Larry, I have had similar experiences like that. Even today after placing several area lights in my plan I could not select them by just clicking on them, had to do as you were doing by dragging a selection box over the area light symbol to get it selected. Strange as the light source layer is active and not locked and tabbing did not work either.

34 minutes ago, skoz44 said:

This worked Graham.  Thanks

 

Anytime, thanks.

Here's an example.

Perspective Overview Camera, Standard render mode.

- sun intensity set to 0.

- sun toggled off.

- shadows off (optional).

- nighttime Ambient 82%

23 minutes ago, skoz44 said:

Turning the sun off only made it darker (see below) and the shadows are already turned off.  Any other thoughts?

 

 

You now need to adjust the render technique nighttime slider to brighten it up.

Try setting the sun intensity to "0". Plus you can turn off the sun.

Took a look at the plan. The main issue is that the 2nd floor room is defined as a "Porch", change the room to say "Unspecified" and the walls and ceilings will light properly. There are a lot of other issues in this plan but that is the main reason for the different wall color depth. Also, as Michael suggested, rotate the columns in the window to have the same orientation.

2 hours ago, CARMELHILL said:

 

That's really annoying. You shouldn't have to do these little tips, tricks, and hacks. 

Might as well add one more trick. In the PBR Rendering Technique Options DBX under Global Illumination uncheck Improve Lighting Quality.

Might be worth reading a few of the test reviews here before dropping too many $'s on an iMac Pro.

7th, 8th & 9th articles.

https://www.pugetsystems.com/all_articles.php

Just now, CARMELHILL said:

 

That's really annoying. You shouldn't have to do these little tips, tricks, and hacks. 

Totally agree, but if things worked as expected then I'd have nothing to do for most of the day.

Here's an example using a floor material region to eliminate the floor from appearing different between two differently lit rooms. The lighter floor section is my floor material region. The darker floor in the room is the rooms normal floor. With a floor material region the floors lightness transitions as would be expected, no sharp transition across door opening.

6 minutes ago, CARMELHILL said:

Don't surfaces get affected differently when they are in a different room than the one being rendered? I always see a different floor appearance in an adjacent room though a 6 foot arched opening. In the OP image it looks like the railing/stairwell is creating a separate room where the rendering settings and lights are not reaching??????? I assume.

Yes that can happen, but as can be seen in my example it does not have to be the case. I created a separate room in the corner, one wall is a railing and the other is invisible, the room is set to "open below".

In the situation as you describe above one solution is to make your floor a single "floor material region" spanning both rooms. Another technique is to define one of the walls as "no room definition".

10 hours ago, Designer1 said:

Has anyone run into any color inaccuracies using PBR?  I havent experienced this in Raytracing before.  Its so drastically off, that I use the rainbow tool to make sure the material texture is even the same thing because looking at it its clear its not.  Sure enough identical textures, in the same space for lighting so I cant understand how the colors are so different on the same material.

 

The frustrating thing about when this happens is theres really nothing you can do because had it been a different texture I could just correct it.  This is the correct identical material just showing up different thus making any renderings useless using this view because it looks like you painted incorrectly.

 

Attached is an example of what Im talking about.

Best if you could post the plan. Could be a lighting issue or a setting.

Wouldn't run out and buy these cards right now. Those plug-ins are for AMDs rendering program ProRender not the actual graphics cards. Also, in the fine print on those cards the only current software that can take advantage of the linked cards is AMDs ProRender.

17 hours ago, Renerabbitt said:

Your duct is picking up other environment light. maybe protruding through an exterior surface. haven't downloaded the plan yet. EDIT: or what he said ^

 

Rene, if you have some time you should take a look at this one. Yes turning the sun off resolves the problem but if you look at the duct none of it is outside of the room. I've played with it and it's a bit strange, the main run of duct is a molding polyline with a repeated 3D molding. Just out of interest I converted this to a symbol and placed it back into the plan and it renders correctly when the sun is on.  The original molding for the duct is a 3 D molding with a repeat, what's interesting is it only happens on this type of molding, if I use a regular molding then all is ok. Something does not seem right when using a repeatable 3D molding.

Looks like the duct material has been set to be emissive, if so set it to zero, non emissive.

Since it was all of a sudden, have you tried closing the plan and rebooting your system just to make sure it was not just some glitch.

Seems ok here. Might be best to post an example of the standard 3D rendering you are getting.

7 minutes ago, mtldesigns said:

What's that texture on your walls graham, I like it! 

That wall texture is actually a wall covering. Just copied a swatch pic from the supplier and used it as a texture, here it is. Wall coverings are gaining in popularity, as this project is in the UK the existing plastered walls are not in the best condition, the wall covering is being considered as an alternative to the time and expense in having all the walls plastered again.

4 minutes ago, robdyck said:

It does!

Thanks, I'm not certain why but to get it to attach I had to first upload using choose file. Then click on the thumb below, it inserts as a big dark blank vid window, then click the "link" icon, choose insert into post, this inserted the text link and then delete the big dark blank vid window. Something I'm doing must be wrong. Well at least it worked. Thanks everyone!!!

Back to the original subject. As this little vid demonstrates the lights do not go on and off as the camera moves between rooms. Suspect the original OP's did because the walkthrough camera was not likely set to use all of the lights. Can be a bit confusing as the walkthrough camera gets it's setting from several different dialogs, the default sun setting, the default 3D Rendering settings for PBR, the default Full Camera view settings and the settings dialog when you activate the record walkthrough. They really should just add a separate walkthrough camera DBX so we could set everything related to the walkthrough in just one place.

Let me know if this works.

PBR Walk Through