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How do I make the lighitng look good? The light looks way too uniform, not much attenuation etc.
A Few notes:
a) I am using many small planes in each room as emitters. The emitters point straight from ceiling to floor (perpendicularly)
b) The glass is just a surface (no thickness)

*I have never seen an exterior night shot of a high rise building done well in MAXWELL. Someone please tell me how.

nappy wrote: *I have never seen an exterior night shot of a high rise building done well in MAXWELL. Someone please tell me how.

http://www.maxwellrender.com/forum/view ... 51#p281651

yes that one is good..that's the only one i've ever seen basically and another one done for Asymptote (dubai project).

That's great...! BUT HOW DID THEY DO IT?

nappy wrote:That's great...! BUT HOW DID THEY DO IT?

http://www.maxwellrender.com/forum/view ... 52#p280952

Hey MS thanks yeah i checked that link yesterday thanks again.

What does this mean:

"so i assume you have grouped emitter polys together and then used different temperatures in different groups so that the scene can be fine tuned in ML? Is there any image based lighting or are you using a dusk sky system? - I had always doubted MW for this kind of work- so you have proved me wrong with this image (and render speed)"

Say there 10 light sources arranged in a matrix...5 of those would be in 1 group with different temperature and another 5 wouldl be in another group with temperature #2...Is this what they meant? For example

Some improvement, i'm only rendering out 2 floors of the hotel for testing purposes.
1. What else should i do?
2. WHY is the glass almost non-reflective Maybe I should use HDRI? I am using maxwell 1.7 atm but EVERY HDRI i use looks pixelated anyone know how to fix this?
3. I will hide some of the emitter geometry (namely the red/orange colored ones)

nappy, you could probably do away with 90% of your emitters and have a single plane emitter illuminating each room.
do this first to get your interiors illuminated the way you want to(grouping the various emitter colors/temperatures and hiding them to camera/global illumination if necessary), then for your final result, if you want to actually see some light sources, go in and place smaller emitter planes like you have done only for the rooms they will be visible in and fine tune from there.

your glass isn't showing any reflections because there doesn't seem to be any external lights to pick up on. if the hdri's you are using are pixelated, then chances are they are of low resolution compared to your render output...

UPDATE AGAIN with HDRI and minor temperature tweaks:
But the problem with large planes is that i won't get correct attenuation/diffusions of light. And what's wrong with using smaller planes?
I am currently only using 3 groups of emitters (or 3 meshes rather) --> red, yellow, white light
Thanks

Day render with glow from lights...will attempt night render again later

The heavy jpg artefacted image background sort of ruins all... try to make a good photo for the back, because the building is looking pretty cool now..

UPDATED daytime render with some internal lighting:
What do you guys think? Herve?

oh the rendering itself is gettin better and better ... but the compositing is ... errrrr ... not the best and it disturbs the overall look of that image.

Have to agree with djflod. The render is looking great now, but the composition looks really off and brings the render down with it.