[zman]

Hello,

Thanks Pietro for your multi-light podcast!

Below is my first multi-light rendering(s). This is how my family uses our apartment at night, as told by the lighting. My bedroom is on the upper left, and my daughter Lola's bedroom is on the upper right. There is a back room (TV room) and a bathroom to the right as you walk in on the lower level, and a TV at the base of the stairs. You can's see the Televisions, however they were made to emit light as well.

The rendering was done at widescreen 16:9 aspect ratio 854x480. I let it render for about 12 hours. The rendering was invoked from ArchiCad - I think next time I will save the mxi file and start after I shut down ArchiCad as this must be taking some overhead.

There are about 22 light sources, however the Japanese hanging lamp used each surface as an emmiter so I had about 24 showing. I did not merge any of the surfaces as I was rendering from within ArchiCad.

Once the rendering is done it only took about 20 minutes to mix the lights the way I wanted. Very very cool! Not exactly a typical animation but I put together the images in After Effects (you can also render the mixer animated in Maxwell with eMixer) and it looked great, like a modern version of a scene from "The Shining" movie.

I am curious how much longer a rendering takes with multi-light vs a fixed setup - I will have to try out. Anyone know if the difference is huge?

Also there are some bugs or limitations... I had no problem with a copius quantity of multi-lights, but I could not get it to work if I introduced the sun, no matter how I limited the number of light sources. I don't think this was a RAM limitation. Any advice would be appreciated.

Albert

[Daniel Hruby]

Try reducing your film size by a factor of 10. 36x24 shoud be 3.6x2.4 from what I understand. You images currently have a toyish look as a result of the bug in the plug in. I dont know if its been fixed yet in the final version, but I am still rendering with these settings. It will help expand the depth of field.

[zman]

Thanks Daniel,
I knew it looked grainy and the depth of field was very shallow. I will try with the reduced film size and check the results.
Albert

[zman]

Daniel,

I experimented with the film size. The smaller the film size I used, the greater the depth of field became. I do not think the original film size was wrong, as the original camera I used was at 1/30 second at f4 so there should have been a shallow depth of field as was rendered. I could have accomplished the same thing as reducing the film size by using a 1 second or longer exposure at f22, more akin to architectural photography.

For the eMixer samples below, I reduced the film size by a factor of 4 (1/2 size in length and height). the depth of field is markedly more shallow - probably more so than it should be at f4, but the result is good I think. No difference on the graininess (these look better because they rendered while I was away for 4 days over the holidays).

Note that I modified a floor texture from the mxm site since last post so it looks more like the bamboo floor in my apartment.

Also a question: should the film size use the same aspect as the final result? In my case I am using 16:9 so that I can mix with NTSC widescreen video in the future.

Regards,
Albert

[Daniel Hruby]

Albert,

I think the last image looks to be at a better scale, but I think the armchair should be slightly more in focus.

As for the film size, I read somewhere, in one of the forums that the plug in was off by a factor of 10. Everyones first images were looking like toyland. Ultimately, use your eye and get the results you want by playing aorund with those parameters.

As for film size and output size, i always try to match them up proportionally so that i dont end up with a final image that gets chopped off.

Great work though on the moel and materials. Its definitely improving!

[zman]

Here's one last image - rendered over several days, with sunlight and 3 light sources. The contrast between the sun and the 100w sources was too great to mix the two together convincingly, but at least I managed to get the environment to work with the Multilight/eMixer, which I previously could not do, although I do not know why.

The image is still grainy after all the rendering time - I think this is due to the architectural wall material I am using which is probably more complex than it needs to be (and the glass materials as well). Any suggestions on speeding up rendering times would be much appreciated. Thank you.

[Daniel Hruby]

Looks pretty good.Buy Neat Image for cleaning up remaining noise. You can use the far right wall for the sample area. Couches look a bit stiff to me. Very ArchiCAD like. And the textures for the coffe table seen to be tiling pretty obviously, you might want to work on that.