[gadzooks]

Interior Lighting do's and dont's

1. Do not use glass in windows unless you have to have reflections. And if you need reflections it's best to use the AGS material.
2. Hear are the three best methods for lighting an interior scene.
a. place emitter planes in the windows.
b. Use skydome instead of Physical sky as skydome will clear up much quicker.
c. Use IBL (Image Based Lighting). But make sure it's a good HDR image with enough lighting information.
3. DO NOT EXCEED 240,240,240 RGB IN REFLECTANCE O IN ANY MATERIALS.
4. Turn off multilight function to save ram
5. Group emitters or combine emitters to limit the amount of emiiters.
6. Do not enclose emitters inside of a glass material.
7. Displacement causes more noise avoid it unless you have to have it.
8. Use fill lights around your scene (Behind the camera) to help in reducing noise and render times.
9. Make emitters as low poly as possible. A simple plane with one surface is much more efficient than a sphere.
10. Never have emitters pointing into metal (shiny) cones that produce caustics.
11. Avoid using coating in materials.
12. Always try and model to a scale. Not having a scale to your scene will produce problems when you try and light a scene with emitters. A interior room that is 10' x 10' foot that is lit with a 100w emitter will give predictable results.

Please add or update or correct this as i thinks it's very useful for everyone to have this especially people who are new to maxwell.

[m-Que]

Wow, that's a great idea.

I think, we can add "avoid using coating in materials" in there.

[Aji Enrico]

Would be nice if Maxwell could somehow warn, hint or give tips when you do things "the wrong way".

[m-Que]

Would be nice if Maxwell could somehow warn, hint or give tips when you do things "the wrong way".

Well, there's 'Benchmark'

[Bubbaloo]

Number 3 could be corrected. I often use up to RGB 240 for bright white materials. Max 220 may appear too gray in some lighting.

Also, I would think that emitter planes in windows would clear up faster than any environment lighting through windows.

[RobMitchell]

Thanks very much for the list! I'm not very experienced in producing interior renders, but we do get asked to do them every so often... These do's and don't's will be a great help when making them.

[gadzooks]

Thanks everyone have updated the post to reflect your suggestions. Keep them coming!

[fallingbrickwork]

Many thanks for this list and the heads up. I am currently working on an interior scene and know that I am abusing and going against most of those points. I will revisit my set-up tonight with new eyes.

Thanks again,
Matt.

[Half Life]

I have a question about why not to use coatings in particular?

In my experience coatings for shiny plastic and ceramic type objects generally clear faster than using the additive layer approach and don't "grey-out" the color of the material like the old BSDF blending approach.

Additive blending mode in general is a noisemaker -- this is particular true in sunlight.

Some of these rules seem pretty arbitrary to me -- is the goal for quality, faster rendering (higher SL), or faster clearing at low SL?

For instance you could make a rule saying "don't use complex IOR" but that would be ignoring that most metals with complex IOR render nearly as fast as without... and metals in general render fairly quickly.

A good guideline for reducing noise would be to carefully control the roughness parameter as rougher objects will cause less "noise" in general -- but many modern material are quite shiny when new. And related to part of that I often see people not understanding how to use Nd and Force Fresnel accurately, which means that objects end up unrealistically reflective which also contributes to noise...

Noise is mostly just caustics that have not resolved (yet) -- and they can either be refractive or reflective in origin... but both effects come with a high render cost, so the bottom line is opaque rough surfaces will render with less noise in general.

If you are looking for faster rendering controlling the camera is a useful tool as DOF effect and diaphragm both have impact on rendering time.

And for that matter saving a large MXI/Image file often (during the render) will slow down render time considerably -- which you can get around by disabling MXI or saving to a low bit-depth image, or increasing the minimum time to save to disk (or all of the above).

SSS materials are extremely slow to render and if you want something to render quickly they should be avoided, because here SL will not tell you much about how long it has taken to get there.

When you get done with all of that you find that most of the nicest features of Maxwell are excluded and then I have to ask "why even use Maxwell at all?" -- to me the best and only real reason to use Maxwell is you desire maximum quality and the subtle touches that most other engines cannot reproduce any faster (if at all).

It seems to me the better approach is to just make the best looking image and make use of a renderfarm service (or Felix) if more speed is required...

Best,
Jason.

[Polyxo]

If you are looking for faster rendering controlling the camera is a useful tool as DOF effect and diaphragm both have impact on rendering time.
Jason.

That's a great list Jason! Could you please elaborate on that statement a bit further. I also find that these have an effect but wasn't able
to press these effects into a formula - can you?

Thanks, Holger

[Half Life]

Small/short DOF (out of focus elements) is basically a more complex thing to render, this is also the way we reveal the Bokeh effect which is controlled via the diaphragm settings.

A polygonal diaphragm will render faster than a circular diaphragm -- the less blades the polygonal has the faster it will render... but it you have infinite focus then those calculations will not come into it at all which is the fastest option.

Don't get me wrong I love DOF effects, but if I need more speed or if it just doesn't matter for my image then I just set focus to infinity.

(Links were included for new users)

Best,
Jason.

[Polyxo]

Small/short DOF (out of focus elements) is basically a more complex thing to render, this is also the way we reveal the Bokeh effect which is controlled via the diaphragm settings.

A polygonal diaphragm will render faster than a circular diaphragm -- the less blades the polygonal has the faster it will render... but it you have infinite focus then those calculations will not come into it at all which is the fastest option.

Don't get me wrong I love DOF effects, but if I need more speed or if it just doesn't matter for my image then I just set focus to infinity.

(Links were included for new users)

Best,
Jason.

Always useful to ask you! Unfortunately I also love shallow Dof and see that moving close and dialing in extreme values may have quite an impact...
I was not aware of the lower blade count bit - will try reducing.

Cheers, Holger