Kray's little brother

[bigstick]

Guys, just a quick note to thank you all for setting the bar so high and posting truly inspirational work here.
It's what inspired me to keep working with the Kray engine, and help bring it to a wider audience of designers who don't have quite the range of expertise that you have.

For those of you who don't know, Podium is kind of Kray's "little brother". If runs inside SketchUp, and has a vastly simplified interface. The engine can be fully scripted in the preset files.

We have been getting some really nice results from the engine for a while now, and some of the best images can be found here.

Your help with Kray settings (Jure has been a massive help, and I have been using Janusz's tips for years) has made it possible to create a series of presets which cover most situations with a single click. Obviously we aren't up to your standard yet, but we're trying hard. If you have any suggestions for improvement, I would love to hear them!

[jnom]

Some renders look a bit dark. Some look great. The exterior front renders are my favorite.
The renders that look dark could use some soft fill lights like in photography.

[Janusz Biela]

Congratulations ! Nice renders. I am happy to see people who can use Kray in correct way

[jure]

Very nice works! I was surprised to see the quality you were able to achieve by just using sketch up.

[bigstick]

We have only just implemented invisible lumi polys, but at the moment they can only be doublesided, which isn't good for all cases.

The purpose for implementing these was specifically to help with dark interiors. We can now use these in window openings or as photographers' fill lighting. We haven't pushed the feature too hard until we overcome the doublesided issue.

We should get even better quality as we add more features. We still have some problems with blotches (even with QMC modes) and AA settings being too low.

Default settings are:-

rotated grid 3 FSAA off
edge absolute 0.1 edge relative 0.1
edge thickness 1 edge overburn 1

edge normal 0.01 edge z 0.1
edge upsample 0

undersample 1 undersample threshold 0.0001,

I find that FSAA doesn't seem to improve quality that much for the additional time it takes, but any advice you have will be very gratefully received!

[Janusz Biela]

I think FSAA looks better (i know is slow because each pixel is calculate)
Grid 3 box 0.8 with Rotate Grid is the best solution for good AA. Scenes produce many different noises (reflection blur, Area Light, GI, shadows even bump maps) ...and FSAA reduce this very good. If You start use no FSAA AA You must setup perfect relection blur, shadows, Area lights quality....so You lose time render.

[bigstick]

Thanks Janusz! I'll try this.

The other settings okay?