Smoothing & transparent surfaces... oh & more...

[Nemesis CGI]

First off, hello I'm new here, I'm Shaun Lee Bishop. LW nutter...
History:
Forced to look into a new render for LW that can compete with VRAY, lets face it I really don't want to learn how to use max & VRAY while I see a deadline closing in.
KRay came recommended from another closed user group, so here I am, KRay in hand, long nights with the coffee pot...

Now the problems:

With smoothing. I would normally set my angle to around 35, but KRay is not smoothing these surfaces as LW's render. Is this a know bug?

I'm also having problems with some transparent surfaces not being transparent, I'm I missing something blindingly obvious?

Will alpha channels be supported soon? I require this this most for my line of work. Is there a BETA group for KRay I can join?

As a new KRay user, I'm looking for some (good, no excellent) sample interior scenes to pull apart, you know pick up some lighting tricks for such renders. Any help would be cool.

Many thanks,

Shaun Lee Bishop.

[silverlw]

Kray is still under development so some of the things you're mentioning is fixed or about to be fixed. Alpha channel and alot of other buffers have been working for quite some time now in OpenBeta3 and OB4 is on it's way out.

Tutorials,scenes and tips, just look around this forum and you find them.

[Nemesis CGI]

Kray is still under development so some of the things you're mentioning is fixed or about to be fixed. Alpha channel and alot of other buffers have been working for quite some time now in OpenBeta3 and OB4 is on it's way out.

Tutorials,scenes and tips, just look around this forum and you find them.

Thanks for the reply. After posting I had a hunt around and found a wealth of information.
This plug-in has been a life saver! Best buy for me this year

Many thanks,

Shaun.

[Nemesis CGI]

Here's my first test. A little dark also the background image is missing?

Any thoughts?

Also how can I boots the surface based lights range & fall off?

Shaun.

[silverlw]

Are you using lightmapping? If you use photonmapping you need to add the backdrop image on a plane or sphere to make it cast photons.
Nice scene overall but AA suffers. Try Pixelfilter "cone" and try a filter radius of 1.0-1.5

[Captain Obvious]

Mitchell is, by far, my favorite pixel filter. Nice and soft.

[Nemesis CGI]

Here's my next image. I had to run a noise reduction out side of Kray.
The scene has no lights, it lit by a background HDR image & surface lights.

With out hitting high render times what the best setting to reduce all the noise?

Shaun.

[Nemesis CGI]

Another quick question, (might be on this site somewhere already) how can I add more contrast & strength to the shadows & GI colours.

Thanks,

Shaun.

[acidarrow]

Are you doing uncached renders? Using cache irradiance will eliminate all noise..

[florian]

Another quick question, (might be on this site somewhere already) how can I add more contrast & strength to the shadows & GI colours.

Hi Shaun,
you could try HSV mode for stronger colors. For more contrast you could try Paths 2 or 3 and Corner Distance 20% - 50% in the FG tab or try the different tonemapping functions (try exponentioal, gamma 1.6 e.g.)
Or bump the contrast in post.

Cheers, Florian

[Nemesis CGI]

Are you doing uncached renders? Using cache irradiance will eliminate all noise..

Cool, I'm not. I though cache was for animations...

Shaun.

[Nemesis CGI]

Another quick question, (might be on this site somewhere already) how can I add more contrast & strength to the shadows & GI colours.

Hi Shaun,
you could try HSV mode for stronger colors. For more contrast you could try Paths 2 or 3 and Corner Distance 20% - 50% in the FG tab or try the different tonemapping functions (try exponentioal, gamma 1.6 e.g.)
Or bump the contrast in post.

Cheers, Florian

I'll give that ago.

Thanks.

Shaun.

[jure]

Also try decreasing "photon multiplier" <1.0 to get darker shadows. Sometimes I put it to 0.5...