OCTANE RENDER. Lighting issue. Multi Storey Car Park Tour.

[SciFiFunk]

A Car Park scene at night rendered in OCTANE via DAZ 3D (car models from Carrara editing session).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RallDje2P88

Can anyone tell me why the back ground goes progressively dark when no lights are altered during the animation? Also the light on a van flickers.

The lighting is the environmental lighting turned down to 0.5 with the colours made dark (dark grey and silver) set to 14:00 GMT. I've used this elsewhere to get ambient light in a night scene and it seems to work quite well.

I then applied a blackbody white emitter to all the hanging lights (3 models in all), and turned up the power to 2500.

Is there are setting I can make to correct this? Any help appreciated. Thanks.

Please note all vehicle windows are blacked out in the future for privacy reasons, which is why they look too dark. Also I'm aware the overall scene is probably too dark as well. It's the sudden change in rendering the back wall that concerns me. THANKS!

http://www.facebook.com/scififunk

[linvanchene]

edited and removed by user

[SciFiFunk]

Hi,

Thanks for your reply. I'm using the Direct Kernel, the main lights are from the overheads (Blackbody emitters), but sunlight/ambience (set to Silver and Black) from the daylight environment (at power of 0.5) hit the side and back of the room. It's rendered at only 12 fps.

Maybe that's it. Maybe the overhead lights don't reach that part of the scene, and the sunlight struggles to hit the back of the car park when I change camera postion?

However it was all ok at the start of the animation. I have not changed any light values during the animation, I don't think you can animate them yet in DAZ's OCTANE plugin can you? If you can, please let me know how.

[t_3]

hmmm. strange.

my first uneducated guess would be rather sthg. material and/or kernel settings related but actual changes in lighting itself; i'd try to render the scene with clay mode on, to see if it then behaves differently.

am i right that this only happens if you render out the animation and _not_ when you manually forward to the later frames!?! even more strange, since this apparently is a camera-only animation.

next point: did you have auto-rayepsilon on? there are some notes about this feature: auto-rayepsilon needs to somehow know what the main point of interest is, so it uses the focus distance to calculate the rayepsilon. if the camera is set to auto focus, the plugin can only grab the focal distance from the _daz_ camera (since octane doesn't report the auto distance back). if the focal distance of the daz camera isn't explicitly controlled (or keyframes set), this might lead to some strange values when the camera moves.

to put it short: manual focus and explicit focus keyframes should work better (regarding auto-rayepsilon); to test out if this is part or cause of the strange effects, you should try it having it disabled.

@linvanchene - regarding fps: these should (in theory make no difference. i can also only speculate what in particular was meant in the post you are referring to (maybe sthg. with the new timeline features in the standalone?). the daz plugin does (currently) only update the geometry (means neither material settings nor environment or render settings are changed or recreated during an animation). afaik some other plugins do a full (maybe optional) scene rebuild for every new frame, so they might behave differently...

[t_3]

I don't think you can animate them yet in DAZ's OCTANE plugin can you?

not yet - correct...

[SciFiFunk]

Thanks T_3

Ok I'll try those things. It might be after Easter now, but I'll make it the next 3d thing I do. I'd love to "know" what this problem is, then it gives me an excuse to do a tutorial.

It's a good reason to explore some of those things you mention. I'm new to this kind of rendering so it's all a learning curve.

Glad you are hinting that camera / lighting changes may be animated within octane in the future.

I'll be back as Arnie used to say.

[t_3]

I'll be back as Arnie used to say.

i actually did choose "T3" as (net) nickname when T2 came out. groundbreaking 3d fx, silicon graphics workstations with purple housings ... oh those years

[SciFiFunk]

Ah ha! Wondered what it stood for.

[linvanchene]

edited and removed by user

[SciFiFunk]

T_3

First of all sorry for the delay in getting back to you. Balancing a myriad of things atm.

So with auto ray epsilon ON. It goes black at the back of the car park on frame 427 whether in clay mode or not.

With it OFF, the back of the car park is always dark.

I didn't think camera settings change in OCTANE. Are you saying that it takes animation data for the camera settings from DAZ?

Either way in Direct lighting (as I will be using most of the time to animate with atm), it looks to me then that I'll need to put in some fake lighting for areas far away from the daylight lighting sources.

There are overhead (emitter) lights near the back wall, so I'm surprised that the back wall is not lit up with Ray epsilon OFF.

Any thoughts? Is this a bug? Or do I need to accept that this is how the Kernel is set up to work. I can adapt if this is the case.

Thanks