[dutch_designer]

As a newbie to this, I wonder how big some of the photon maps are people are generating for this?
I'm now playing with just a caustic map and no GI bounces to speed things up, instead relying on a skylight to give some extra softness to the shadows generated by the area lights. Also I'm tuning down all the settings that I won't really need so I hope to have at least a bit more speed in my second attempt.

[arch4d]

arch4d,

Which file did you download for this try ?
I see those rings are not smooth (there is distortion like in Mihai's) ... so I better check that file to see what is up with the mesh.

-

thomas, it was the .3ds file.

think it has to do with the smoothing.
perhaps it looks ok after recalc normals in studio...
that also helps for imported cinema4d geometry.
the phong (or smoothing) tag isn´t converted correctly.

[LarsSon]

As a newbie to this, I wonder how big some of the photon maps are people are generating for this?
I'm now playing with just a caustic map and no GI bounces to speed things up, instead relying on a skylight to give some extra softness to the shadows generated by the area lights. Also I'm tuning down all the settings that I won't really need so I hope to have at least a bit more speed in my second attempt.

I'm using Finalrender. Both light are shooting 1500000 gaustic photons at
this point. Now they are finally looking good. Gi engine is FR-image, so there
is no traditional photons.
You have to get all sample levels really high to get Maxwell quality.
Like in FR i'm using 64 samples for rectangle lights. 32 for blurred reflections.
Every gaustic sample will be collected from 2000 photons. But still i'll get
rendering times under 2 hours. Hard work, but it's worth of it.

-LarsSon

[rivoli]

here's my vray attempt. rendered for 50 minutes on a dual old prestonia xeon 2400, 3 gigs ram (it used up to 1,1 gig during rendering). setup time, test renders and all took me about half an hour/45 minutes.

I know you're interested in vray settings Thomas, so: qmc+lc+photon mapped caustics (adaptive subd AA). I'd say that overall we're in good shape, those caustics still look noisy/blurry but I couldn't get any further with them (I ended up with a 800mb photon map, that alone sucked a lot of memory), and the glossy coins still look bad.

with this being said, for shots like this one (small scene, you can have it done in just one pass, super realistic/detailed dof, shaders and caustics needed...) maxwell would be my first choice anyway.

[Thomas An.]

Well 45 min is not but at all (certainly better than my 14 h image)

What settings did you use for the photon mapped caustics. (I think one of the settings controls the memory size of the photon map)

A bit dark though. No ?

[Thomas An.]

This my try with Maxwell RC5

24 hours

[Mihai]

I really like the richness of the reflections at the back of the golden ring in Maxwell renders, and how the silver coin is reflecting the gold ring....

[rivoli]

(I think one of the settings controls the memory size of the photon map)

yes, you're right, but this one has been my first vray caustics render, and I left it as it by default (plus I didn't imagine I would end up with such a big map).

A bit dark though. No ?

I guess it is, didn't really pay attention to lights intensity. but I guess that would be easily sorted with some post work and a non gamma corrected hdr output.

[Thomas An.]

I really like the richness of the reflections at the back of the golden ring in Maxwell renders, and how the silver coin is reflecting the gold ring....

Yes, these points are very important in judging these images. Especially for jewelry, the subtleties of light makes a world of difference. Jewelry is all about light and its secondary interactions...

[rivoli]

here's a bit less dark version.

[Thomas An.]

here's a bit less dark version.

I was having the exact same problem with the coins ... they are just too stuborn (even after bumping their subdivs to 30 )

[rivoli]

yes, I know. I didn't have the guts to go that far anyway, I stopped at 11.

[Thomas An.]

Hi everyone,

It has always been my impression that reflective caustics is of paramount importance and it is not as much a triviality or a neglidgeable factor as we are accustomed to think in CG.

It is my feeling that a scene without reflective caustics presents a lobotomized version of reality and once the viewer is exposed to the correct rendition they immediately recognise the importance.

This is why I always felt that this particular "rings" scene is very important and why I like to see how different engines behave with it.

Also, here is one example of how an interior scene can be rendered without cuastics and appear to be fine ... except when juxtaposed to the correct rendition then we see how much was realy missing.

I feel reflective caustics is among the TOP prerequisites for realism.

(This scene was rendered in Vray by Vlado)

[dutch_designer]

Hi everyone,

It has always been my impression that reflective caustics is of paramount importance and it is not as much a triviality or a neglidgeable factor as we are accustomed to think in CG.

It is my feeling that a scene without reflective caustics presents a lobotomized version of reality and once the viewer is exposed to the correct rendition they immediately recognise the importance.

This is why I always felt that this particular "rings" scene is very important and why I like to see how different engines behave with it.

Also, here is one example of how an interior scene can be rendered without cuastics and appear to be fine ... except when juxtaposed to the correct rendition then we see how much was realy missing.

I feel reflective caustics is among the TOP prerequisites for realism.
...
(This scene was rendered in Vray by Vlado)

I agree, it's worth checking your own environments and just looking at the walls and ceilings and discovering that indeed they are not just flat surfaces evenly lit, etc. etc.. Nice .gif to illustrate btw

[Mihai]

This is exactly (well not only) what makes a render look like a render, because there are very few surfaces around us that are prefectly smooth, or lambertian. It's interesting in that comparison that the version without caustics is 1H, but the one with is 12H.......