reflections, shadows and indirect illumination

What service pack? Reflections and indirect illumination worked in 1.0.

There is a legitimate way to get what you are experiencing. Check your options under raytracing. You can have reflections set to 0, though I do not think you can get it to happen by mistake (unless someone else worked on the part/assembly)? Check your shadows under scenery to see if they are on, and also check the individual light properties to insure that no one set 'individual shadow control' for these lights and turned off their shadows (but I seriously doubt you would have missed that one)

I'll check what the defaults are in 2.1 when I get the chance, and report back if they might be a contributing cause. I noticed when changing from sp0 to sp1 that my default gamma got overwritten. Its possible that SWx messed with things again when applying the service pack, but again its a long shot.

Ed:

I subscribe to the RBP (random button pushing) method when running P-works. I learn stuff by accident, and don't use it often enough to remember things I learned last time.

Anyway, it turned out that I was using a white background and with the indirect illumination setting, everything was getting washed out. I'm using sp 2.1. The little preview window showed the shadows. Anyway, when I changed the background to a dark grey, it worked ok, but then I had a dark grey background.

How do you get a white background and not let it wash out the shadows and reflections?

matt

"Edward T Eaton" wrote in news:c064hk$13p44n$ snipped-for-privacy@ID-139356.news.uni-berlin.de:

Waz-up matt, Always use these settings to begin with and you'll be off to a great start every time...

LIGHTING (in the Feature Manager)...

*) Ambient, Directional, Etc.: Turn every one of them OFF

SCENE EDITOR Manager...

*) Use a Spherical Room environment (because it's easier to change two walls then six) and make your own floor from a surface *) Or, if you need Perspective View on, use linear walls and use the PhotoWorks floor. A manually made surface floor can make perspective not work very well.

Room...

*) Assign the wall materials with a dark gray plastic *) Change the illumination material type to "Constant" for each wall (except the floor) *) Disable "Resize Automatically" *) Make the room size about 10x bigger than your model

Back/Foreground...

*) Color: Plain with white *) Reflective Background: Doesn't matter here. Your walls will be the reflective factor. *) No fog

Lighting...

*) Select "No Shadow" to start off with

OPTIONS System Options...

*) Screen Gamma: 1 *) All boxes disabled except for "Display progress/abort dialog".

Document Properties...

*) Anti-Aliasing: Medium *) Ray Tracing: Disabled *) Memory management: Disabled

Advanced...

*) Indirect Illumination: Enabled, set to first notch *) Contour Rendering: Model only

Once you have all of this set, do a test rendering. If it's too dark, change the wall color to a lighter shade of gray, or experiment with clouds etc. Always make sure you reset the illumination material type to "Constant". This is how you "illuminate" the model using Indirect Illumination (get it?).

Once the model is lighting up, turn on a Directional light to add Ed Eaton's "Farkles". Adjust that light if it's too bright.

Lastly, you can experiment with shadows and higher settings. But don't do this until you've done the above, otherwise you may unnecessarily increase your rendering time and not know what to adjust to make it render efficiently again.

Many thanks to Brian Hill for some of these tips.

Let us know how it goes, Mike Wilson

No, actually from my tests, when you leave that option disabled, the 'Number of reflections' defaults to around 3 or

4 (I think, it's been a while) and the 'Number of refractions' also defaults to a certain number, even though it shows a different amount and is grayed-out. I was trying to make it simple.

Maybe things have changed since my last experiments? However to make things consistant, we should come up with some good default settings of our own.

How about enabling it and setting it to... Number of reflections: 5 to 8 Number of refractions: 3 to 4

What do you think is a good start Ed?

I agree

Thanks for the feedback Ed, Mike Wilson

OK, you are not turning off raytracing - you are just turning off the control and using the defaults.

Reflections should remain at 3-4. You need at least 2 or renderings of reflective things next to other reflective thigns look wierd, but any more than 4 and it won't make that huge a difference because there's enough complexity to fool the eye. That is, unless you are attempting one of those infinite mirror thingies (like that candle in a mirror we played around with a year and a half ago).

Refractions are a different story. When the refractions run out, the ray goes black if it has not made its way out of the refractive material. Imagine rendering a phonebooth (remember those?). If you have refractions set at 3, the environment on the other side of the phone booth will look black. You need to have refractions set to 4 or more in order for the light to get through the glass (2 panes of glass, each with 2 refractive surfaces) and show whats on the other side. I set refractions up higher, experimenting with how much black is acceptable in areas where the light is just goign to bounce around for a while.

Wow. That looks like good information. I've lost patience with it for now, having got something out of it that was good enough for my purposes, but next month when I go to render something again, I'll check out this list. Looks like a lot of work. You've got to do this for every part and assembly you render?

matt

"Mike J. Wilson" wrote in news:2bf6e3bd03b194b81ee9e5686fa10830 @news.1usenet.com:

...

If you save these settings in your templates, they will be there, ready to go every time.

Mike

----== Posted via Newsfeed.Com - Unlimited-Uncensored-Secure Usenet News==----

The #1 Newsgroup Service in the World! >100,000 Newsgroups

---= 19 East/West-Coast Specialized Servers - Total Privacy via Encryption =---