Kitchen Interior. This one looks really bad!!!

[Josamoto]

Hi everybody!

I've modelled this house, and so I also exported the kitchen to a separate scene to try again rendering with Kray. Haven't used Kray in months now. The results I see here on the forums are amazing, and that's what I want to achieve with this one.

This image looks terrible, but after some reading up in the forum, I've picked up some tips, so please check in next time to hopefully see improvements.

Here she is:


Settings are pretty much standard. I messed up the Gamma setting, no AA here. Please do tell me how ugly it is!!!



I will also try and attach my settings each time.

With the next try, I'm pushing photons on the lightmap skyhigh from 20 000 to about 2 million. I though so many photons would be overkill and burn my RAM. Hee hee! Thanks to silverlw and jure especially for their expert advice in the forums.

[Captain Obvious]

I couldn't manage to load your settings file, so I don't know what's wrong, as such, but...

* 2 million photons isn't necessarily overkill. It's a high setting, sure, but not extremely high. I've used that many several times. The way I see it, if you render an image in a couple of hours, you might as well spend an extra ten minutes to get a super-high-quality photon map. Because really, 2 million photons shouldn't even take ten minutes.

* Your area lights are extremely noisy. Change the area light settings. Increase the min/max, or decrease the threshold. It should help.

* Everything is washed out. This is probably because your diffuse component is much too high. You shouldn't really use higher than 60-70% or so, and it really look like you're using a higher setting.

[Josamoto]

Thanks Cap.

I was wondering what's causing the noise. I tweaked the quality in LW for the area lights, but silly old me didn't even think of touching the area settings in Kray.

The default material diffuse was at 85%, I guess that's pretty high, huh!? Area settings for Kray are at min 0 and max 4. What would be a good setting if I may ask?

I just tested the RAR archive with my Kray settings, they loaded perfectly with me. Are you using LW9?

[silverlw]

Try setting kray's arealights treshold 0.002 and min0 max4 to
treshold 0.001 and min1 max4. This use to help alot.
If you suspect it's arealights causing Noise yu can also turn of it's adaptive behaviour by setting Min and Max values the same like min2 max2. That way they will work exactly like in native lw and the noise will be constant.
Please tell me how you progress.

[Josamoto]

Just the Precomputer irradiance image.



Here I used 2 million photons. N = 2000. Im getting these bright spots as if someone is shining a torch there. Going to up the N value to 4000.

Will it help if I reduce the precache distance?

[silverlw]

try n-value 10.000 , I wouldnt touch precachesize since im uncertain to how it relates. Actually i would try with basic 20.000 photons and N-value 2000 from the beginning. If i get a consistent and smooth irradiancemap without brightspeckles try render, if you still have speckles increase N-value further more.

If you with above settings instead get very low detail in the irradiancemap (low numbers of cells) you have to increase photons untill cells are about 10.000-200.000 but then you have to raise N-value accordingly.
The irradiancemap doesnt have to be so very detailed just basic lightconditions, the rest is done with FG.

[silverlw]

A quickie with an old testscene. Sunlight/hdrienvironment/luminous polys for the spots.
Luminosity modell/automatic to get the strong luminous polys to render as direct lights.
Lmapphotons 100000 emitted, N-value 10.000
Paths=1 to get any corner artifacts resolved
FG min 100 max 8000

[Josamoto]

Here's the result. N = 4000 and changed precache distance to 20%. Dunno if the precache change was wise though.

Is this image irradiance image good enough to proceed with the FG stuff? It looks a lot better, so I'm going to try a Photon Mapping render with FG max at 800 rays.



I've attached a RAR archive again with my settings. Lemme know if you guys can't open it. Captain Obvious had a bit of trouble loading the settings.

Hope I can crack this soon, coz I wanna start texturing. I am overly exited about this little kitchen of mine.

Thanks for the help this far guys, and keep watching!!!

[silverlw]

omg. Did that took you 26minutes just to calc the irradiancemap?

I would turn on a render for the night but use higher values of FG like atleast min100 max5000

[Captain Obvious]

For a scene like that, you REALLY don't need more than between 5000 and 10,000 irradiance cells, I think. So set the number of photons to around a million, and then keep turning up the N value until you get those 5000-10,000 cells.

Turn down the diffuse value, and turn down the intensity of the lighting. It's a lot easier to make a too dark image a tad brighter, than it is to make a really bright one darker.

[jure]

Josamoto I think you're realy complicating your life too much...
This is how I work:
Start from fresh default Kray settings.
Get rid of area lights. Use backdrop gradient texture for your light and a spot for a sun.
Use lightmapping and about 500.000 photons N 5000. The rest leave at default.
Use "Precomputed Filtered" to see if your irradiance is smooth enough. If it is still splotchy then turn N up a bit untill it's smooth. http://www.kraytracing.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=89

Then Photon mapping with cached irradiance and go to FG tab and leave default settings except spatial tolerance and oversample. Turn spatial tolerance to 0.2 or 0.3 and oversample to 500%.
Render it and post it to this thread so we can work on it more.
Remember that you DON'T need to tweak all the settings!

[Captain Obvious]

Turn spatial tolerance to 0.2 or 0.3 and oversample to 500%.

Why would you turn up both the spatial tolerance and the oversampling? I'm pretty sure they do the same exact thing. Increase the oversampling, and you get more samples in the same exact manner as if you turn down the spatial tolerance.

[jure]

Why would you turn up both the spatial tolerance and the oversampling? I'm pretty sure they do the same exact thing. Increase the oversampling, and you get more samples in the same exact manner as if you turn down the spatial tolerance.

Nope. Increasing Spatial tolerance will make samples farther appart. This will result in less detailed shadows, so for example shadows under small objects like chair legs will get lost. The idea is to use spatial tolerance only as small as you need to get acceptable shadow detials.

Oversample on the other hand samples more FG samples togather. So 200% will interpolate always with at least 2 samples (100% means one sample), 500% means 5 samples and so on. This helps reducing splotches that come from insufficient FG rays at the sample point.

[Josamoto]

Oki doki. I've stripped all 6 my area lights. Things are moving a lot faster now. With this image I used 500 000 photons, N = 5000 as suggested. This is only the precomputed illumination.

I placed a spotlight outside with inverse falloff ^2, 1m falloff and a huge 100000% of brightness. Outside I've also put an HDRI image with imageworld and pumped up the brightness to 1500%.

I dunno if I'm setting my light up the right way. I mean I could also change the falloff to say 100m and adjust the brightness accordingly, but I'm not entirely sure which way is right.



Doing a render now with your settings as suggested for FG, thanks Jure.

Thanks for the help this far!!!

[Captain Obvious]

I placed a spotlight outside with inverse falloff ^2, 1m falloff and a huge 100000% of brightness.

I suggest you instead turn up the falloff's nominal distance, and leave the brightness at 100-200%. It makes the OpenGL preview look better. And you can replace the spot with an area light.