[t4nkm4n]

Hi there,

i have some problems with the Maxwell-Fire engine in SketchUp. In nearly every rendering i got those tiny little withe dots.

Can somebody give me a hint where those come from and how to avoid them?!

Greetings

[stefan_kaplan]

Maybe you are using the Draft-engine?
If so, the white dots should eventually disappear over time, but in final renders you are better off using the Production-engine.
Avoid completely white materials - go for light grey instead.
/Stefan

[Delineator]

could also be the light coming in through the glass. Yes, it SHOULD clean up eventually, but here are a few shortcuts I use:

-make sure the glass is AGS (not physical glass)
-hide the large exterior windows from global illumination. Should get rid of those issues and should render up cleaner and faster.

[t4nkm4n]

hey thanks for getting me on the right track

but how do i hide some from the GI ?
Can`t find a button or an option... is it in the texture menu?

[polynurb]

check your materials for additive layers. it looks like overpowered caustics/reflections.
it is best to use additive mode with much care and only if you can't get the desired effect other ways, as it seems they can mess up the power balance of maxwell's calculations so you end up with super high intensity pixels which can't really be solved by AA functions.

also you could try to simply clone your entire model, put clay on it and then layer by layer reintroduce the geometry with materials already assigned and see when the dots start appearing.

-daniel

[Delineator]

hey thanks for getting me on the right track

but how do i hide some from the GI ?
Can`t find a button or an option... is it in the texture menu?

sure, just make sure the glass is a group (or component). If not, make it one. Then within SU, right click with the group selected, go down to Maxwell>From GI>Enabled.

The menu is very confusing and not organized well, but basically what they are trying to say is that there are 4 categories you can hide geometry from (or it will ignore it): camera, GI, reflection/refraction, and z clip. If its set to "enabled" that means its on. Pretty simple, and very effective to hide floating fill lights in your scene.

As a general rule of thumb, physical glass does all the caustics and what not, but when you have your 1 and only light source streaming in through a physical glass window, you can get some noise that takes a while to clean up. That's why AGS is great: it will do reflections, but not refractions or caustics, so your scene will clean up easier.

[Fernando Tella]

Don't use Fire for final images. It's optimized to get the initial calculations faster so you get a very fast preview, but it can be much slower for the most complicated calculations. If you are trying to get a final, clean image use the production engine.