Hello
i must be annoying people by now, i am playing with another interior scene, i am not getting very good bounced lighting, i have enabled FG and GI, weather i set my GI to 500 photons or 50000 photons, the solution just gets worse with more and was never very nice. i have a sun coming through the windows, MR sky portals, and photometric lights in the interior but where a bulkhead occludes the ceiling from light from windows, it just keeps looking very dark.

just FG with multiple bouces achieves the same but then the rendering doesnt have the same warm feel as it did with the GI enabled.

i am youtubing as i am waiting for responces to see if i can fins any more information but all help is appreciated.

thanks.

i am trying to get good illumination with great shadow details, AO is enabled in most materials as well.

3ds Max Design 2010/11/12, 64bit, Boxx technologies, dual quad core 2.8, nvidia quadro 4000, 20GB Ram, use mental ray for rendering, windows XP pro 64bit

well, i dropped my GI settings down to 500, and boosted my FG to low and it starting to look better.

dont know if this was the correct thing to do but seems to be ok at low res, will see if it works at high res later.

3ds Max Design 2010/11/12, 64bit, Boxx technologies, dual quad core 2.8, nvidia quadro 4000, 20GB Ram, use mental ray for rendering, windows XP pro 64bit

OK: Try this-

Check the box that says to “all objects receive and generate GI”.

Set average Photons per light to 1,000,000 but the Max. Samples per Photon to 500.

Use Merge photons to 18” and check the “Optimize for FG” box.

In Final Gather set it to 300 rays, with .5 density and 0 bounces, with merge FG points to 35.

“Use Falloff” in FG should be set from 0 to 120” (assuming it’s an average interior scene). Basically find the longest distance between to objects and set it 10% more than that.

Doug
http://www.dbowker3d.com

New England independent 3D animator specializing in technical, mechanical and medical animation.
System: Dual Intel Xeons E5645 2.4GHz (24 cores), 24GB RAM, Quadro 4000, Win 7 Professional SP1 64-bit
3DS Max user since r2

thanks Doug, i am going to try those settings but i have a feeling it is going to kill my render times. but i want to compare the final images vs time to render to see what happens. i will set up a DBR render over the weekend.

BTW. i checked out your site, i was really impressed with the animations, GREAT WORK. i have been trying to convince my company to go animated but they dont see much use for animating architecture, i will just have to do one and blow their socks off.

thanks again for the tip.

3ds Max Design 2010/11/12, 64bit, Boxx technologies, dual quad core 2.8, nvidia quadro 4000, 20GB Ram, use mental ray for rendering, windows XP pro 64bit