You really need to render an animation of a gravitation on/off scenario to see those cubes rising and then falling to the ground in a convincing way.

McNistor
You really need to render an animation of a gravitation on/off scenario to see those cubes rising and then falling to the ground in a convincing way.

Thank you
It's a good idea, but first I need to fix more aspect like the render time… now is around 1 hours and half per frame

Mat

Ouch! How many lights do you have in the scene and have you tweaked the samples for each of them or left them to default?

12 point light (1 per neon) with a different intensity from 0.025 to 1

http://www.art2upz.com/__TEMP/sci_fi_corridor/sci_fi_wip_015.jpg [www.art2upz.com]

1 spot light in directional mode




and 1 environment light where I change the samples



in mantra node I change the sampling for all and in global also, with 7-7 and 2-2 time jump up to 4h if I change with 7-7 and 1-1 (default value) time go down and I render it in 1:30h.




Also I have on emission material (principal shader with emission enable) for neon light. I try also with portal light but if I apply it I lost the glass effect on my windows so I disable it.
Now I have my scene in office so I can't check and try it agin, but maybe the good things is started to test one light per light and try to apply step-by-step for understand if point light give problem or not.

Other aspect, maybe, ned to test the material and working better on it for reduce some bad-things or not good for this render like glossy or sss effects, maybe is on and doesn't need it in this case.

Thank you for your help and I hope you understand what I write.

Mat

I think the Env light's sampling of 8 is too high. Reduce it to 1 or 2 and see how your render time goes and try to identify where the most noise is coming from. Usually the main culprit is the diffuse component (shadowed areas) and reflection (highlight areas). Up the samples just for these first because increasing the global quality will increase things that don't extra samples but will eat up computational juice for nothing in return.

In general, and by that I mean not just in Mantra, you'll want to tweak the global dials at the end when you're prepared to render the final image/s and want to bring everything one or two steps higher in quality.

Also, go to the Limits tab and dial down the defaults of 10 if you haven't done that already. Go to 1 for reflect/refract, SSS to 0 since you don't have any in that scene (I don't think it's taken into consideration if no sss shader is called at render time, but it's good to develop certain habits), and see how it changes the look of your scene. Up the reflect/refract limits until you no longer see a difference. The default diffuse limit of 0 is a good one as far as optimization goes, but a value of 1 will bring forth lots of details in dark areas, but at a cost of more noise which of course means more computation/time needed to solve.

I'm not a Mantra expert so feel free to experiment and to report back, I'm sure I'll learn something as well soon enough.

Hi McNistor,
thank you for your comment and advise. Ok I try to setting the quality step-by-step, for now I apply the geometry light on the neon and now my time go down a lot. Actually I have one environment light, spot light and geometry light and time is around 30 minute. Now I working on the samples for find a good result.
I update you when I can
Thanks for now
Matteo

Up… now I'm working on the reflection samples

Up… I render it in the night I don't know how much time, but I think it's a good result for now….

I can continued to add more details

As a purely aesthetic suggestion, I'd turn down the reflection intensity of those walls and increase the roughness a bit.
What's your Mantra settings for these?

Here mantra setting, I push a few the reflection in global and limit




And here the materials

Blue-Part


Wall and curve part


Cooler Grid


Floor - generic White

Cool. Do a single frame test to check the render times when you're in the mood.
As a small side note - as far as I gathered from various forums on different render engines, brute force/unbiased ray-tracers have a harder time with enclosed spaces; they're much better for “outdoor” usage. Biased solutions are a better choice at the moment (I think) if your main focus is “interiors”.
Also, it seems that the preferred/encouraged way of using the new mat context is to use the “material builder” containers. Nothing wrong with dropping shaders in the “root” but again, it's a good habit to acquire for more complex scenes.

This is my first time I complete and render one scene of interior inside Houdini. I'm (ex)3DS Max user and I used Mental Ray and V-Ray for more time. Yes usually brute-force system is very good for exterior scene or complex simulation. For interior it's more difficult to management it, however I used mantra for some explosion (exterior) or similar, never for interior or design so I think to try it also because now I use the apprentice so no alternative like Arnold or redshift…

Ok, I need to study also material and texturing so… maybe tomorrow I'm looking the new system you said.

Thank you so much
Matteo

hi there!

I came back here, but not with the sci-fi wip… I take a little brake on it and concentrate my study on the another aspect like UV, Shader and Flip-fluid, so today I want share with you my first test on fluid.

https://youtu.be/guoFELPtZew [youtu.be]

have a nice days

Matteo

Hi Matteo.

Interesting thread. A lot of good stuff in here.

Just taking you back to your Sci-Fi corridor scene. I'm looking at your render settings and I'm wondering why you have your pixel samples to 8x8.

I try my best to keep the pixel sampling down as low as I can. Yes it makes a nice clean image, but if you look at the problems individually you can make a nice clean render with a lot lower rendertimes than using pixel sampling.

So Houdini 16 has a lot of individual sampling sliders. Please use these!

For example: If you are using global illumination you always get noise in the shadow area's as you do with any other renderer. You can clear a lot of this with the Pixel Samples. However a much better way is using the “Diffuse Quality” parameter.

For subsurface scattering, try and use the SSS Quality parameter before pixel sampling.

The trouble with Pixel Sampling is that if you use any other form of sampling (for example: Reflection Quality), the pixel samples are multiplied by each sample value set in Mantra. That can be a lot of samples.

A better way is to use extra image planes.

Mantra –> Images –> extra Image planes. Choose the ones you want to inspect and render in MPlay or render view (render view for me). Each of those image planes with be saved into the buffer where you can choose from the rendered view (C), (direct samples), (indirect samples), ect, ect. You can view these individually so you can trouble shoot area's, and see what areas need additional sampling, and which don't.

With this knowledge you can improve areas of the render without resorting to huge rendertimes.

Keep up the good work, some nice stuff going on so far.

Ragupasta thank you a lot for your advise, I follow it in the next time and try to fix my sci-fi scene, I take a little break from it for study the Flip-Fluid and actually I'm in render for the cache of some element on my river, I hope to finish it in this week and then maybe I can came back on my corridor and start the UV and finish the render or add some element (like a volumetric of other…).

For Mantra I add in my bookmarkes also the guide from sideFX and I study it when I find a time.

https://www.sidefx.com/tutorials/mantra-user-guide/ [www.sidefx.com]

Thank you again and I hope to upload more new stuff in the next time.

Matteo

nice thread, keep it up

Hi,

I came back and today I have a little question on cloth cache. how can I save it without the satic object?

Usually I use the “DOP import field” and choose the field I want like smoke, particles, fluid, but in this case?

thanks
Matteo

I attached the image for better understand

however… first test

render of peeling FX, it's 2 sim