Tips for Raytrace

[Northriver]

I have done my first ray trace of the exterior of a plan but it does not look anywhere as nice as the ones I have seen in the thread " Show me your goodies". Any advice would be helpful.

Is the grass image really that bad in Chief? 

[DavidJPotter]

The thing about Ray Tracing is patience and perseverance as well as lots of try's until you get the settings for lights and materials just the way you want it. The most realistic grass I have seen was done by those willing to create their own grass texture and apply it to thier views

 

DJP 

[Northriver]

Chief has more inside light options than the outside. I just did not know what direction the sun should be facing at the side that is being rendered. Tried shadows ect ....  Manual is useless in this area as well as most cases with Chief as it just explains very basic operations and even that is questionable.

[country]

There is a fairly new series of videos on rendering available in the training section. It has some good explainations of setup, lighting, etc,

[Northriver]

Thank you Sherry. I have never had to opportunity to do a raytraced image before. One of my customer's agents wants an exterior raytrace for marketing purposes.

[DavidJPotter]

All competence comes from "study - practice - failure - restudy and then getting it right". There is no list of presets that works on every possible ray traced view, you discover them for each view by running a quick ray trace, adjust properties and then try again until you get the overall look you want. There is no other workable way.

 

Typically these days my Ray Traces take about 30 minutes to do (20 minutes for set up runs and 10 minutes for final runs to a product). It is often a matter of "acceptable quality" which you are the judge of. I started Ray Tracing back in earlier versions when Pov Ray was used (Pov Ray is a free Persistance of Vision rendering program that Chief Users until they developed their own render engine). Pov Ray worked but it was hard to use and required more self study in order to get a decent looking render.

 

DJP

[warrenwest]

All competence comes from "study - practice - failure - restudy and then getting it right". There is no list of presets that works on every possible ray traced view, you discover them for each view by running a quick ray trace, adjust properties and then try again until you get the overall look you want. There is no other workable way.

 

 

 

True story. I have been hard at work trying to 'perfect' ray tracing over the last 2 years of using this product and Im still learning something new every single day. Keep at it !