LIGHTS

[Kimberly Rodgers]

What would be the reason the area light would not be on.  The lights are set on a custom preset that allows the daylight and the lights to be on.  However the rendering only shows the downlights as gray circles.  Thanks

[Peter Milner]

They are on, but there is much more daylight coming in through the window which is thousands of times brighter. So the Auto Exposure makes them look dull.

Either increase the brightness of the lights, or decrease the brightness of the outside light. If you've used separate lighting channels you can do this in the nXt editor.

However, both of these give you an incorrect lighting balance.

My favoured solution is to assign a glowing material to the light sources (about 0.2 is usually enough).

[Roy Hirshkowitz]

Interesting rendering.  Before you resort to glow-- check a few things.

 

Use two channels, like Peter suggested, so you can easily turn the sun and sky down and make sure the lights are actually working.  (Just set channels to 2 in the Advanced tab-- the lights and the sun will automatically go to different channels.)

 

Make sure the lights are set accurately.  If you use wattage, every 100 watts gives you 1700 lumens.  Most commercial downlights provide at least this much power.

[Chas / Aug Posekany]

I resisted responding to the post as Peter did knowing Roy would have an issue with using the material glow option.

It is a cheat to an actual lighting situation but sometimes necessary.

[Roy Hirshkowitz]

It's not necessarily cheating.  The disks Kimberly is using represent more complex structures like cans-- these can reflect a lot of around that we're not getting to see.  Just want to make sure that everything else is correct first, before going the glow route.

[Kimberly Rodgers]

Hi, Thanks all, I am working on a different view right now and I  changed the two materials that I want to distribute light to glow- which is the frosted glass in the hanging pendants and I also wanted some light from the awning, however the awning now is "super" glowing and the pendants are not at all. Not really sure how the glowing should work or how to set the downlights to glow.  I took down the intensity of the sun and changed the time and it was still overpowering the downlights.

 

I attached the jpeg of the view, this rendered for 5 hours and the lights are not right and there are 4-5 materials that look completely wrong, I did a mock rendering in a smaller file to see if they render right, and it renders correctly.  The gray wall on the left, blue wall on the right and the flooring are all not true to material.

 

Attached is the model, there are some areas that are just "patched" being that the building is huge and too big for one file.

[Roy Hirshkowitz]

Don't use glow.

 

The model never made it-- you may need to use the upload link if you want me to take a look at it. There are likely a bunch of problems with this one.

[Kimberly Rodgers]

the file just finished uploading

 

[Kimberly Rodgers]

any tips for the rendering of the wood and mesh material.  Up close they render well, from far its just one color blob

 

[Roy Hirshkowitz]

The drawing never made it so I'm just guessing here....  If you're assigning materials by layer you may want to use the Remove Material from Object button on the objects that don't look right.  Often there is an inadvertent by object assignment on some things that this procedure will take care of.

Make sure your units are correct.

There are obviously some lighting problems as well.  You can try uploading the thing again.

[Chas / Aug Posekany]

It does appear that many of the objects are not accepting you materials by layer.

Try selecting the remove materials from object button in the material tab and select the offending objects.

And as Roy mentioned your units settings must be set correctly for your drawing.

[Kimberly Rodgers]

I just checked the units, the one setting was set at unscaled now all the materials are working  Thank you!

[Roy Hirshkowitz]

I did get the file this time-- I may not be able to take a look at it until next week.