Rendering Critique

[jtcapa]

Thanks for the shade Adam, I was just doing and interior window treatment of an existing house, and they had those shades. I had spent and hour looking around in chief for that shade. Your solution is simple and elegant.

[alobartn]

Well, I'm glad it helped!

[alobartn]

Here's that shade with the material I used in the same library. I should have done that first.

[ank345]

Iexport the chief model and render with Artlantis, with radiosity from the sun and one point light and using Neon glass to windows... time take 43 minutes...

[HARRYBSTANFIELDJR]

alan that looks real good, i hope we can get that type rendering one day

[George Godwin]

Alan, - I tried to adjust your Artlantis render in Photoshop and I found that it is very hard to bring up details such as the hardwood floors from the Artlantis render.

Adam's original Chief render had better image information to work with in Photoshop in terms of being able to adjust low, medium and high tone levels and hence bring out the details of the different materials like the floors and the countertop materials. The stool material in Adam's render was very good as well.

In comparing the two, I would rather work from the Chief render in terms of making adjustments. It may be particular to this scene and your lighting compared to Adam's lighting but it was no contest in terms of bringing up detail and original colours. The Chief/PovRay render was much easier to work with.

[alobartn]

H'mm. Very interesting thoughts. However, my rendering took 30 hours, whereas Alan's took less than one.

[ank345]

George,
I know nothing about PS. for me, I can adjust the colour tone of any materials within artlantis itself.. Darker or lighter tone Red, purple, green and so on...Most important is the TIME factor.. some time i need to do 5 or 6 rendering in a day... i just can't affort to spend 20-30 hrs in one rendering...

I have done one raytracing with the same model in chief. it takes me 25 hrs++ to have it done.

[ank345]

George,
Try and see what you can do with this image in ps..

[George Godwin]

Alan, - I am attaching a detail comparing the Chief render by Adam - using the image he posted in this thread and the Artlantis image posted in this thread by you. Both details from the two images were adjusted with the same control in Photoshop with the upper tone levels adjusted. I believe this illustrates the amount of image detail available even in a 100 kb version in both images side by side.

Keep in mind that Adam's render which took a long time resulted in a large file, namely, a 42.6 mb bitmap image. That is a lot of pixels generated by the Chief/PovRay render, namely 2700 x 1800 pixels. I would be interested to know what size of image in terms of pixels that the Artlantis renderer produced in one hour.

I think the attached image tells a lot. Speed is not the only factor. But one can agree that the balance of quality and speed required for one's business is important and relevant. I would like to see the Chief/PovRay renderer improved in terms of controls and speed because I think the PovRay renderer is one of the best in the business.

[George Godwin]

Adam, - The results from the 30 hours were worth it. I think the PovRay renderer is superior to Artlantis based on samples that I have seen but the PovRay renderer needs more speed and controls. I have used some of the best renderers available in 3dsMAX and the PovRay renderer as incorporated in Chief has the potential to be a first class renderer with more controls and speed.

I have also used 3 renderers with other software and the result in this case - when I brought the Artlantis image into Photoshop - reminded me of an older render engine used by Poser 4 which was superceded by far more complex renderers in Poser 5 and Poser 6. But again, this could be peculiar to the lighting of this scene and other settings.

Your Chief render was much better to adjust in Photoshop by far because it had far more image detail information. Maybe that is why Artlantis is so fast. It may not process nearly as much information in the final analysis which would not be a good trade-off for the sake of speed. It is the image detail that counts.

[George Godwin]

Alan, - The attached image that you posted above was subjected to just one adjustment in this attachment, namely the upper tone levels were adjusted as in the image comparison above with the stools and the floors. If this is an Artlantis render, it is much closer to the original posted by Adam. Is it an Artlantis render or a Chief render? - As it turns out, this is a Chief render.

[George Godwin]

I am no expert on PovRay but it is a great rendering engine and I will post 2 examples - one interior scene (all 3D) and one exterior scene (all 3D). They look like photographs. If we could master PovRay in Chief and get full advantage of PovRay's rendering engine, we could duplicate these results.

[George Godwin]

An exterior 3D render using PovRay. This render took 1 hour and 30 minutes. For more PovRay render images you can go to http://hof.povray.org/

[Night8917]

Hi George and all others.

I do agree with you that PovRay is a great Ray Trace engine; you can get a very good result from it.

I think the question is; is it a professional tool??

I think the answer is NO, I would think that hobbyists made 99% of the pictures in the Pov-Ray hall of fame and they have the time to make changes after changes to a Ray trace until the picture is perfect, a professional doesn’t have the time to do this.

If you can make 25 – 30, Ray traces with Artlantis during the same time as PovRay makes one, where do you have time to make adjustments to a picture? In Artlantis of course, and even if you make the picture 10 times bigger to get a better resolution it’s faster.

There are so many Rendering/Ray Trace engines out there today and 95% are MUCH faster than PovRay, the only advantage I see to PovRay is that it’s free.

I could show you Renderings/Ray Traces made in many other software’s that are picture quality, but like the Hall of fame 95% are made by the gurus for that software.

I’m sorry to say but in the world of today time is money.