New Grafix: lighting & reflection

Aracirion · Post by **Aracirion** » 18 Mar 2006 01:51

While doing some city buildings for the grafix replacement I hit upon 2 problems, which I would like to mention here:

Lightning: Using the standard light setup for buildings I encountered a problem: The final image will be much brighter than the material preview window. Is it possible to change the preview window lighting in blender? Otherwise, wouldn't it be more useful to have a light setup that will more or less mach the material preview? simply changing exposure seems to work to that effect...

alternatively: wouldn't it be possible to use a skydome backdrop image and let it affect radiosity?

Relections: Large Office blocks have many windows. It would be very useful to have some common environment map for reflection. The problem is that because the buildings are seen from above, we should see a reflection of the floor in the windows, not sky which would be much easier. Or should we just make the windows black?

Alltaken · Post by **Alltaken** » 18 Mar 2006 04:02

agreed on both accounts.

The material preview does not show correct materials at all. it is being re-written.

what exposeure did you change it from and too?

Alltaken

Aracirion · Post by **Aracirion** » 18 Mar 2006 10:55

I only changed range from 1 to 2 (see attachment)

Alltaken · Post by **Alltaken** » 18 Mar 2006 22:30

try not changing the Gamma. but rafter change the material reflectivity from 1.0 to 0.8

Alltaken

Aracirion · Post by **Aracirion** » 14 Apr 2006 00:18

rather change the material reflectivity from 1.0 to 0.8

that doesn't solve the problem: if I just lower 'material ref', the material is still much darker in the preview than in the final render. On the other hand, lowering 'range' also makes reflections darker (which is not desirable). It would really be best to change the light setup so that its brightness is closer to normal. Is that not possible? just make all the lights about half as strong as they are now?

Alltaken · Post by **Alltaken** » 14 Apr 2006 01:56

the material preview is not suposed to be a show of what it renders as "its an approximation"

the new blender version that is soon to come out 2.42 will be far closer to the same in the preview and the final render.

base your final settings on the render, not the preview.

Alltaken

dmh_mac · Post by **dmh_mac** » 14 Apr 2006 10:17

I'm responseble for the lighting setup and it's pretty shoddy.
When I made it, I guess I gave all the lights values that were too high. To get renders that look like the preview the combined light strength would have to be somewhere around 1.000, in my setup it probably over 2.000.

I'm sorry

On the refelections:

A reflection map wont work in orthograpic images, because it uses the same pixel for anything it sees at the same angle. So if you have a cube each side will have only one pixel (or so) of the reflection map.

The way I do reflections in my images is surrounding the tile with a plane that has an aireal-photo like texture and the SHADELESS and ENV buttons pressed (you can check it out if you download my blend files I posted in the Blender thread a while back).

Alltaken · Post by **Alltaken** » 14 Apr 2006 11:54

the correct way to do reflections is more likely using the "sky texture" button.

There is probably still the old light setup around which was darker that i liked. its not much darker than the current one maybe only 0.2 on each light. its still the same as dmh_macs....

infact its probably in your PMs dmh_mac, unless you deleted them.

but perhaps we should do a brand new one. and get some good votes on it, we should probably try and solidify a few materials before solidifying the lights though, play them off against each other to get a good comprimise

Alltaken

Aracirion · Post by **Aracirion** » 16 Apr 2006 00:45

dmh_mac:

the combined light strength would have to be somewhere around 1.000, in my setup it probably over 2.000.

so couln't you just reduce the strength of every light by half? Or do you want to leave the lighting as it is now?

dmh_mac · Post by **dmh_mac** » 16 Apr 2006 12:56

Aracirion wrote:dmh_mac:
the combined light strength would have to be somewhere around 1.000, in my setup it probably over 2.000.
so couln't you just reduce the strength of every light by half? Or do you want to leave the lighting as it is now?

I'd say give it a try and report your findings...

Aracirion · Post by **Aracirion** » 16 Apr 2006 13:52

I changed 5 lights & ambient occlusion energy. Is there anything I have left out?
I noticed there's an environment map called 'textures/emv/field2.jpg' which I don't have. Where can I find this picture?

dmh_mac · Post by **dmh_mac** » 16 Apr 2006 20:33

Alltaken wrote:the correct way to do reflections is more likely using the "sky texture" button.

This will have the same problem as a reflection map, since it is also dependant of the normal direction.

Alltaken · Post by **Alltaken** » 17 Apr 2006 00:21

dmh_mac wrote: This will have the same problem as a reflection map, since it is also dependant of the normal direction.

depends how we deal with the image it is reflecting.

i guess that being an Ortho camera it will mess a fre things up.

your way might be best infact. lets test them.

MeusH · Post by **MeusH** » 17 Apr 2006 08:27

Please also upload or give search directions for city env map (with buildings instead of green fields)

Alltaken · Post by **Alltaken** » 17 Apr 2006 23:51

well we will choose either one or the other.

so which should it be people? city or country skymap?

Alltaken

MeusH · Post by **MeusH** » 18 Apr 2006 08:21

It'd vote both - country for houses and city for office blocks.

dmh_mac · Post by **dmh_mac** » 18 Apr 2006 09:10

I still feel using a plane with an aereal photo mapped to it works better.

When you use a reflection map all the windows on a side of a building get the same uniform colour. With my method you get an actual reflection.

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