Nighttime Raytraces in X9 Not Dark Enough


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Hello,

 

Has anyone else experienced nighttime raytrace issues with X9?  I'm finding that they are not coming out dark enough.  Looks more like dusk/dawn or a really cloudy day.  Landscape lights certainly don't "pop."  Even with every landscape light OFF and Ambient Nighttime turned down to 10% or so, the scene is still too bright to look like it is nighttime.  The front of the house is over-illumniated.  Submitted question to Chief Technical Support and received suggestion to turn down Ambient Nighttime and perhaps a different background, but these tips did not resolve.  

 

Thanks in advance for any advice.

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  • 4 weeks later...

Thanks to all repliers.  I appreciate it.  Not even SSA help desk could address this one.  I will try setting the nightime ambient to zero (thanks Michael; beautiful nightime raytrace) and I will also try the "black light" (light set to color black) trick (thanks Jon; nice nighttime scene... a little scary looking!  ;-)).

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  • 1 month later...

Jcaffe, could you please let us know the exact settings you used in your ray trace DBX and also for your 3D view defaults (lighting options and backdrop). I did a lot of playing around with different settings and i can't achieve the same effect. The windows inside the house all appear to glow as if there is an even light inside but there isn't (see attached). I'm going nuts trying to figure it out!

 

Also where do you position your black point light source relative to your house?

night3.thumb.jpg.f2b39ffa7784c7770e291f87edbb9f79.jpg

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Harry, CA, by default, will add a light to any room where there is none.  So, at a minimum, you'll need to add a light source to each room and then turn it off or adjust it to appear as you want.  As for outside stuff, the black point light only works so far as there is a room defined (see default light above) otherwise it's sun settings.  You must have either default sun or actual sun settings defined, then set it to black light color or a nighttime hour or both.

 

Once you get your scene sufficiently dark, then start adding light sources and fixtures set to give you the desired effect.

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4 hours ago, Chrisb222 said:

Experiment with Ambient Light: Color settings in Ray Trace, Lighting panel, with "Use Camera View Settings" unchecked. The default Color setting is white, making it gray will affect the darkness of nighttime ray traces.

 

I along with probably many others appreciate this sage advice.  However,  if most users are like me,  we don’t have the time to experiment.  It seems that we would benefit if we shared our knowledge.  When this beta stuff is over and we can openly talk,  I hope I can put together some GTM’s so we can share our knowledge.

 

this reminds me of what I learned about the Mourie people of down under when I visited the Great Glenn Woodward..  All the tribes spoke different dialects so they never learned to communicate with each other and share their knowledge.  Hence they never progressed.

 

 

 

 

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With further experimentation (there's that word again) I was able to achieve an ok result. I had to drop the nighttime ambient setting in the 3D view defaults DBX and include a dark backdrop there too.

 

Thanks all for your input. I now know more about the way the program works! Would be good if the help file discussed all the options and showed the different effects with example images.If anyone has seen such documentation then please let us know!

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