Cubaricua Interior- Daylight and night Render issues

[Allan Chesney]

Hi Robert,

Sorry I have not commented earlier and this is only going to be brief as I am heavily involved in a totally different, away from home project so just no time at present.

A few general points quite random (not following any of the points in all the previous posts in any order just I recall the points) and some of which Doug may have touched on too:

First I would do your test renders at dramatically reduced size 300x 200 for example or even less - it is much quicker and usually enough to see if lighting is somewhere near what you want.

Still not convinced you do not have a corrupt wall and file size is worrying. I would still like to be able to test it as I mentioned in the other post and obviously Jack would to.  Do you have Winzip as it has a SendZip plug in that will send all sizes throught regualr email.

Global time is only for Daylight - no bearing on artificial lights.

For interiors daylight should be off - background will always illuminate regarless, so lights overhead out of view or 'street lights' strategically placed, can illuminate exterior features that are in the view.

I find it best to use the same light bulb in ALL fittings. If one is too bright because it is near a wall for example, change the brightness by using a shade of grey for the bulb colour, instead of changing the wattage.  Try using exterior bulbs inside too.

All my tests using Targa image for transparency have not been sucessful. Magenta however has always worked if BMP is used and colour is true Magenta (255. 0, 255). JPG will work but gives a pink fringe as the colour drifts near other colours. TGA image seem to have a semi-transparent fringe, which renders as a hazy grey colour. I personally would not use them. They have never been recommended for transparency.

In my 10+ years of using the program I can count on one hand the times I have changed the brightness setting - use very high wattage if necessary.

For ALL lights to work, you often need to render at level 5 (but TEST at lower level and small image). My tests have shown that some lights will not imuminate at low levels.

The actual light of the bulb cover or lamp shade comes from the Emmissive value set for the bulb or fitting texture, not from the light source itself. Because a bulb does not look bright, does not mean it is not giving off light. In fact you can lower the light source so that it is close to a table top for example, while the light fitting with is illuminted (bright white) shade is still on the ceiling. I do that nearly all the time - recessed fluros in the ceiling but the light source 1200mm (4') below it. This put the brightness where you want it.

Sorry these thoughts are just random and also for any typos. Hope they help somehow.

Allan

[Jack Zimmer]

Yikes Robert,

I hope that was a typo 

even though I deleted unnecessary area for this project is still over 25,000 MB 

When you render and interior with Radiosity, the program renders the whole model. This comes in handy when doing animated walkthroughs, so the intial Radiosity calculation can be 'saved' and only Raytrace is calculated for each following 'frame'.

So, the reason you are getting such long rendering times is that the whole model is being calculated, even though it seems you want to render just these 'two' rooms.

Strip out everything that isn't in the view(s) , that you want to render. Make sure lights are reduced to a minimum and only those that affect the view(s) to be rendered. You should then be down to less than 10 minutes for the rendering and with a good computer down to around 4 or 5 min MAX.

The stripped down file should be small enough to email..

Jack

[funrob29]

I had the exterior lights off when rendering interior with no sunlight.


replies:
By exterior lights I think in terms of 2 kinds: 1) sunlight (via internal TFP on/off)  and 2) exterior located landscape lights such as tall street lights, etc. For interior renders turn off sun but turn on landscape light(s) if you need light from outside to show inside such as thru a window (and if I recall there may still be a bug for light thru open doors; maybe?)


5. Yes often with sun on in interior renders the sun overpowers the interior lights even if little sun enters thru a window. I think that is a serious s/w bug issue. The only work around is to turn sun off and replace light thru windows with an exterior landscape light source.

Hi Doug,

As I mention, I believed the issues are do to my PC. Video Card.

I Had purchased a new GeForce 6200 512MB Graphics card but had removed do to having the issues we discussed on earlier forums and I believe you said that Graphics Card really didn't make a different.

I decided to disable my inboard Graphic card and install the New GeForce Card and at first I got error messages ( I will post screenshots of the results in the next posting). I open the NVIDIA GF Control panel and by adjusting the settings to allow 3d program to set prefer setting and adjusting Quality setting instead of performance.... I was able to render Step:1 1000/1000 and Step 2: 600/600  , Only problem is the photoboard tree inside where hurricane and the catalog trees were terribly Fuzzy.The BMP Trees I created W/ Magenta won't work apparently  there's issues with my PhotoShop  Magenta RGB colors not being the correct  so I'm redoing using CMYK Magenta Color to see if that will work.

In The attach file is a sample of the renders created using FLOORPLAN V10 in Advance rendering, with Global sunlight ON and interior Light and you can see it worked GREAT.

I'm doing few more test with the new GF GRAPHIC CARD at Level 4 and then Level % and will post results shortly

Thanks

Robert

[funrob29]

This was the error Message before I fix by changing the settings to the NVIDIA GF Card.

the additional attachments are the results after fixing the GF Card rendering Level 4 step 1:1000/1000 Step 2: 600/600 in about an Hour. I'm doing few more test and then will post results

Then I will try Level 5 and Hope to be able to render Step 1: 1500/1500 and Step 2 

Robert

[Doug.S]

If you suspect the video card at any time, consider turning hardware acceleration "off" (program settings/graphics) and run the render again.

To my knowledge h/w acceleration only applies to screen display not to renders to a file  (they are different), but h/w acceleration "on" can interfere with  renders to a file or to the screen.  Turning it off takes the video display card out of the calculations and renders are done only using the CPU (not the GPU).

You can run a test for yourself if the h/w acceleration "on" does work....run the same render with it on and off and compare the render times and the rendered image.....I think you will find the image results the same and the render time the same (but I could be wrong...Jack and Allan do you agree?).

But the difference will be that with h/w acceleration "on" you should see differences in the screen display quality and how fast/smoothly you can zoom and move the view around live on screen.

[funrob29]

Hi Doug

The h/w acceleration is Off, I posted screen shots of the Graphic and Rendering settings and you can see is off.

If I try to turn ON the screen turns Cloudy and Idle. I'm force to restart my PC by forcing TFP to close.

If you look at the screenshots you would see I was able to render Advance in Level 4, there's also a sample of the render. The only issue is the targa trees were terrible (Hurricane). I was having issues with importing Photoboard BNP cause the magenta color would not turn transparent and by copying from the texture bmp a texture call NULL and using it as the background to my trees and saving to the encyclopedia folder as BMP, I was finally able to import the trees as Photoboard, only thing they have a Terrible magenta outline all around.

Now The render gets a error : Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime Library........Runtime Error.........Abnormal Program Termination. 
Then gets terminated and close   

I'm frustrated but haven't given up.

Doing more Test and searching for solutions to see how to solve this problems! 

Hopefully I will have better new soon

Robert 

[Draft Patrick]

If you suspect the video card at any time, consider turning hardware acceleration "off" (program settings/graphics) and run the render again.

To my knowledge h/w acceleration only applies to screen display not to renders to a file  (they are different), but h/w acceleration "on" can interfere with  renders to a file or to the screen.  Turning it off takes the video display card out of the calculations and renders are done only using the CPU (not the GPU).

You can run a test for yourself if the h/w acceleration "on" does work....run the same render with it on and off and compare the render times and the rendered image.....I think you will find the image results the same and the render time the same (but I could be wrong...Jack and Allan do you agree?).

But the difference will be that with h/w acceleration "on" you should see differences in the screen display quality and how fast/smoothly you can zoom and move the view around live on screen.

The rendering process has two stages--> In the first stage, your computer prepares the image (cataloguing surfaces, textures, compiling the data, etc), in other words in this first stage, the processor + the RAM memory are in charge, making calculations. The second part is the rendering stage--> with the info developed and collected from the first image, the image is drawn in the screen, using CPU / vc, video CPU cycles and video card memory
The basic rendering is "muscle based" so it uses more raster resources, therefore your videocard must work in full force
The advanced rendering is more "inteligence based" so it uses more vector resources, therefore if you have a set (motherboard, chip, motherboard, memory), you will render without problems

The problems with Graphic cards  + 3D programs are complex. I am working with 3D programs since 2001, I beta tested some of them under different conditions and settings, so I learned a couple of things 
1 - Most of the video cards are designed for gaming, therefore, for the average card, speed comes first and precision after. In other words, if during a computer game you are "chasing a monster" certainly, you are not interested in the exact shadows of the castle's walls, or the textures' effects--> your only interest is speed. However, if you are a 3D designer, you need accuracy, even if the rendering takes more time. This is the reason why, with several video cards, to get good rendering results and accuracy you need to reduce the speed (accelerations) . Now, the ATI Radeon cards using the Catalyst driver work fine with full accelerations. I have 2 computers one with Nvidia and the other with ATI and the difference is impressive
2 - Onboard video cards/chips are almost useless for rendering purposes. There is a good reason for this: onboard video cards share the processor, therefore (as explained above) the same processor is used for calculations and rendering. With complex surfaces, this process is almost impossible. In other words, if you have just walls, roofs, etc, the system will work, but if you have furniture, columns , molding , etc, (lots of polygons) the system will crash

Pat

[Allan Chesney]

Hi Robert,

I am no expert on computer hardware etc, Pat is and especailly in relation to TFP, so I do not plan to comment on his remarks as he knows what he is talking about. 

I just wanted to comment on the BMP photoboards.

The only issue is the targa trees were terrible (Hurricane). I was having issues with importing Photoboard BNP cause the magenta color would not turn transparent and by copying from the texture bmp a texture call NULL and using it as the background to my trees and saving to the encyclopedia folder as BMP, I was finally able to import the trees as Photoboard, only thing they have a Terrible magenta outline all around.

First of all Targa images are not recomended for transparency in TFP. My tests have shown that they seem to have a semi-transparent haze around them which, depending on the background colour, can produce very poor results or suffer from 'hurricain damage' as you found.

BMP Magenta does work, perfectly, but must be a true magenta over the whole are that you want transparent. If you use a photoeditor that has a 'colour sampler tool' (usually the icon is like an eyedropper) and sample the pink fringe on your original image, you will find it is in fact not a true magenta. It must be Red - 255, Green - 0 and Blue - 255. This is why JPG images do not work properly either, as the Magenta colour tends to merge slightly with the adjacent colour meaning the edge is no longer a true magenta.

It is important also not to resize the image after the magenta has been applied. Shrinking or enlarging the image will also cause the other adjacent colours to merge with the magenta and a pink fringe will result.

I did attach a fairly low res BMP magenta image for you to try but in loading it to the website it changed the Magenta colour, so it was totally useless and I have removed it again. I downloaded it and tried it as a photoboard just to make sure it was still OK, but as I found, it wasn't!     I suspect that maybe some sort of compression on the forum images is used, which caused the colour shift. I have left my render of it there and you will notice there is no trace of a pink fringe.

Allan

[funrob29]

Thank you Pat & Doug 

Pat your explanation was very helpful and confirm my suspicions. By turning off acceleration, disabling the on board card, then installing the GF NVIDIA card and adjusting the settings to let the 3d program to choose the settings has made a big improvement.

The only issues left are do to my Motherboard and Ram of my PC.

Dough, Thanks for giving me the true magenta color # settings, I manage to import photoboard by using a BMP material call Null in TFP library which is working with transparency. Only issue is the trees have outer and inner edges with magenta color.I wish the catalog trees weren't so bad, I found a few better trees in the library but , sorry they don't pass as real    I'm working around the issues to come up with close species to the ones I want to use in the design.

I'm still at Level 4 render and will post the latest sample soon
Once I get a more desirable interior appearance of the interior design I will try Level 5 

Robert

[Allan Chesney]

Hi Robert,

...I manage to import photoboard by using a BMP material call Null in TFP library which is working with transparency. Only issue is the trees have outer and inner edges with magenta color.

I can't actually see how you could use the Null.bmp image to make a pbotoboard, simply because it is an image itself not a colour. You need to cut the tree out, delete tbe background and replace the background with Magenta 255,0,255 as a colour. You also need to have 'feathering' or antialias OFF in your photo edtor, oherwise that will blend the magenta too and cause a fringe.

This is why large images are needed to get the quality. If they are too small then you will notice the squared edges of the pixels which is the problem with many of the ones in the catalogue. he bigger the image the smaller the pixels so the sharper the image will look.

Allan

[Draft Patrick]

Pat your explanation was very helpful and confirm my suspicions. By turning off acceleration, disabling the on board card, then installing the GF NVIDIA card and adjusting the settings to let the 3d program to choose the settings has made a big improvement.
The only issues left are do to my Motherboard and Ram of my PC.

Robert,

If you have an onboard video card (meaning that your video card is part of your motherboard) you can't disable the video card and install a separated video card, because the process is not going to work. And in the long run, you will damage your computer.
Motherboards with onboard vc are programmed to work first with the onboard vc and, if it is not present (or it is disabled ), you'll (probably) get a crash. Keep in mind that, even if you disable the OBVC, you are not changing the program of the processor (motherboard)
And even if the processor looks for the new vc, it will take a long time looking for a new vc, however, it will use the main memory (and not your new vc's memory) . Keep in mind that this process (and time) will happen each time you use the vc, because you are not programming the processor
This explains the issues you related in your posts (rendering time, bad quality, etc)

Pat