Trying to get lighting, reflection and illumination right on a very large Layout is a bitch in PhotoView 360° 2013 compared to PhotoWorks 2010 (which was awkward but worked properly including transparency). 2014 will probably be easier with the new sunlight feature. Looks very promising ! But I seem to be doing something wrong in regards to transparency. In PhotoWorks 2010 I could use Grey Painted textures with 50% or 65% transparency settings to show inside workings of equipment properly.
PhotoView 2013 are barely transparent at even 90% transparency. They show up as very dark grey (blackish) faces that only show a hint of what is behind.
Very similar tot the blackish opaque written about at problems where the refraction rate is set to low for the light to refract through all the faces in between. In this case Setting refraction at 5 or higher should be ok (only 2 solid walls x 2 faces). Tried rendering at best setting (8 refractions), Maximum setting (10 refractions), manually set to 12 refractions. Also tried same with direct caustics & accurate environment lighting selected, and even with complete overlit lightning brightness. Transparent solids remain blackish opaque with only a hint of what is behind.
In the past I tested with PhotoView 360° 2011 version. Back then large Layouts were prohibitedly slow due to rendering in 6 or 8 passes. But isn't that how the effect of reflected and refracted light rays bouncing of faces is achieved ? Maxwell also keeps on cooking these bouncing rays around deeper and deeper untill you stop it because difference is hardly noticable. WHY IS THE STATISTICS OF PHOTOVIEW 2013 ALWAYS SHOWING 1 FRAME PASS AND CURRENT PASS 1/1 EVEN WHEN YOU GO TO 10 OR 12 REFRACTIONS ??? It doesn't seem to refract, although rendering time quadruples to 16 hours. I CANNOT FIND ANY SETTING TO ALTER AMOUNT OF RENDER PASSES ANYMORE ! !?? Can somebody shed some light on this PASS setting ?
Or should I be using a frosty and colored glass texture instead of a Paint texture ? But that would look funny.
Goodmorning Folks
Sorry about my strong wording yesterday ! But it was very late at night after a long day of fruitless testing. I'm actually exciting that I can finally leave PhotoWorks 2010 and can actually stick close to SolidWorks home after realizing that PhotoView 360° 2013 should be up to my specific large large layout needs (thought I had to switch to impressive Maxwell, but its steep learning curve doesn't fit my engineerings focus ;-).
Anyway, I'm getting there, but very slowly. Biggest issue remains transparency. Don't think it is a bug, I'm just overlooking something stupid in the required lighting settings (have seen excellent glass examples, so it should be possible). I've got the feeling I need to share some more background info about my maybe specific problems with Large Layouts.
Screendump #1 is the first pointlight setting that gave reasonable results. In Photoworks 2010 on a Layout this size I needed 6 Point Lights hung high above the factory to avoid light bulb spots and dark surroundings. It worked in PhotoView 2013 as well, but I had to bump up the brightness of the 5 assist lights to 30 W/srm^2 and the Main Shadow light even to 50 W/srm^2 in order to get light in the darkness. Results are somewhat flat and seem to lack proper reflection and shading. The preview window actually needs 1.5 hour crunching before the 3.5 hour Preprocessing time even starts. 6 hours rendering for only 7680 pixel wide resolution is slow, but not a show stopper (I'm used to 3 or 4 hour total time in SW2010 for max 11580 pixel resolution).
Screendump #2 shows improved reflections test after excellent suggestions of Rob Rodriguez. This also showed that lighting and shade mostly comes from the HDR Courtyard dome. The strongest shadow light comes from right foreground, the shade actually comes from Left background. Also you see the Courtyard HDR reflected in the window. Promising but not as expected. PhotoWorks also needed 10 or more point light for the really big Layouts, but only had a % seting for brightness. Apparently on this Area size the light size doesn;'t have enough square meters to emit light over the longer distances.
Screendump #3 shows the much larger selfmade Area Lights that seem to be needed in PhotoView for such large distances. I'm open to suggestions here, because as you can see in Solidworks you are working in the dark (pitch dark background instead of bright Courtyard HDR). And preview doesn't react quick enough in these large Layouts to be able to see what you are doing. By the way, this is one of my smaller Layouts coming in at 15500 bodies (the bigger ones are 30 to 50 thousand bodies). Anyway late at night I aborted the preview of the small test as #2. Lighting level seemed getting ok, so I started up full configuration test and went to bed.
Screendump #4 shows the abortion point coming in the following day at lunch. Apparalently PhotoView doesn't like the large Area Lights, because after 8 hours it only did a small corner of simple 2D grass texture. And the expected 157 hours will probably double ones the buckets hit the actual equipment ;-). The rest of the settings are still the same as #1 which only needed 10 hours (resolution, BEST, 8 refrac and no bloom or Caustic).
This doesn't seem the proper approach, or I must be doing something wrong. It seemed I was very close to finally being able to present a nice Layout overview, so I could finally start with the many detailed views where transparency is the main show ;-).
ANYBODY ANY SUGGESTIONS ?
I really need to get down to the transparency issue, but can't even find the proper lighting setting yet.
For the time being I will only work with testing a small equipment assembly in regards to transparency with more or less standard lighting. Thanks for your time and patience if you reached this bottom line. ANY SUGGESTIONS WILL BE HIGHLY APPRECIATED !!