[JDHill]

Modeling in realistic scale just means that when you are working with a spaceship that's supposed to have a 100' wingspan, you actually do model it at that size in SketchUp. Many times, people do not pay attention to that, figuring that it will make no difference in the virtual 3D world -- but in Maxwell, it does, since calculations are done using real-world values. In the meantime, I did get your email, and I'll be taking a look.

[Jonnydark]

Thanks so much! I will keep scale in mind from now on.

[JDHill]

I have looked at the scene, and what I notice, mainly, are these factors:

1. The hangar is on the order of a half-mile long.
2. The only emitter is set to 219W @ 98.9 lm/W.
3. The emitter is applied to a roughly 20' cube.
4. The environment is set to Physical Sky with Sun.
5. The camera has an EV (Exposure Value) of 14.

Starting with the last item, this EV is suitable for broad daylight; you will find a chart with EVs for common situations at the end of the plugin manual. Your camera is in a semi-enclosed space here, though. Shooting with EV 8 or 9 would allow you to capture an image of the ship decently lit by just the ambient light, entering from the exterior.

Now on to the artificial lighting. The interior of this hangar is something like 30 US football fields in size, and your single emitter is putting out the equivalent of only around thirteen 100W household incandescent light bulbs -- not nearly enough to light a space of this size. And beyond this, being about 120 sq. ft. in surface area, the cube has only a very small amount of light being emitted per sq. inch; somewhere around 1/50th as much as one of those 100W bulbs. So it will appear to glow only very dimly, when viewed directly.

So, we know that we don't have enough light, but how much do we need? We can just guess, but with a little googling, I ran across something from the Teamsters, indicating that they would like to see on the order of from 100 lux (lm per sq. meter) for a dimly-lit warehouse, to 300 lux for one where people are handling small items and reading small labels. So that gives us a rough idea what we're shooting for. If we do the math, for a space the size of your hangar, this ends up being between 15 and 45 million lm total for the space. Given that the single cube we currently have is putting out about 20K lm, that means we would need between 750 and 2250 such lights, to light the hangar well enough to keep the Teamsters who work there from staging a walkout.

You probably don't really want to do exactly that, though. Depending on the look you are after, you can probably get by using ten or twenty high power lights. Likely, you do not want to make these as boxes, since the box emits light in all directions. If that is important for realism, then by all means do so, but if not, just use planes (easiest to use a single face, grouped), and angle them so that they contribute lighting to the scene in a non-wasteful way.

Hopefully you find this helpful...at least, it should clarify a bit what we mean when we say that Maxwell is a very physical renderer.

[Jonnydark]

Hi

This is help that is above and beyond anything i've ever experienced with any software. Thank you!


Okay so i had no idea my scene was that big... I can defiantly shrink it and see what happens.

[Jonnydark]

Okay so i shrunk it to a pretty tiny size and the emitter works great! I made it a plane, made it a bit orange and it's casting a nice warm glow over the floor.

Victory is ours! (Pic soon)

[Jonnydark]

yayyy!

[JDHill]

Good deal. Looking at the image, I'll just mention that for a final render, you will want to switch to the Production engine; it handles such lighting situations much better than the Draft one. And while you have indeed got it working, your mention of making the model "tiny" makes me want to ask: what size is the model now, and what size is it supposed to be? Judging from the size of the cockpit, I'd guess the entire model could have been scaled to about 1/3 or 1/4 of what it was when you sent me the file. If you bring things into realistic scale, and still do not have enough light, that should serve as indication that either your exposure is off, or that you have too few lights, or too low of power in your emitter materials.

[Jonnydark]

actually that interior light it low power on purpose.

But don't worry i will be making many more images with Maxwell and do very different scenes.

For example...

How would you set up a city scene? Like i want to do a fly over of a futuristic city at night. It will look like a crystal chandelier basically... except huge-normass.

My thinking is do it tiny... as if i were rending a chandelier... then use the sandbox tool to make a landscape below it.

Then i can use photoshop to insert renders of space ships flying all about it.

I think that will be cool.

[JDHill]

I think that once you get into that type of situation, anything goes, really. As long as you know how to create the lights you want to see, you'll do fine.

[Jonnydark]

I figured you'd like to see how it turned out...



I think my professor will really like this.

[crcgrp]

How would you set up a city scene? Like i want to do a fly over of a futuristic city at night. It will look like a crystal chandelier basically... except huge-normass.

You should check out a sketchup plug-in called "Greeble" It could be used to quickly create the city buildings, after that you would just need to add textures and lights.

scene is lookng good!

[Jonnydark]

Thanks crcgrp!

That Greeble looks helpful. Thanks!

[Jonnydark]

I have a question:

Why is the progress bar in the render window so subtle? one would think that's pretty important to be able to see am i right?

[JDHill]

That's just how I made it. And really, it's not very important, since a Maxwell rendering is never finished. You can tell Maxwell to stop rendering once it reaches a certain sampling level, but that only means that it stops rendering then, not that it couldn't have rendered longer, had you chosen a higher level. For a final rendering, it is better to use a sampling level you are never likely to reach, say 30, and then just save the image once you are happy with how it looks. In Maxwell Render Suite, you can change your mind about that after stopping the rendering, and just re-start it -- it will pick up the rendering where it left off.

[Jonnydark]

YOU made it? Wow... Well done!

Okay now i understand.

Here's the next one... I love the mood in this...