Lit Appearance Calculator

Old News I know but thought I would add it to this section anyway as some people cannot find the info due to the PhotoBucket fiasco.

Please see below a few details for the Lit appearance calculator I have made to assist in helping to calculate the brightness on different sized objects.

You will need at least Microsoft Excel 2003 installed on your computer which was used to create it.

I always monitor the brightness of lit appearance in VR mode in ArtiCAD and make sure you lower the Ambient light to 10 to 25 percent to get a better feel for how the lighting looks.

If you want to make use of the copy buttons you will need to change the macro security as shown below. It will work without changing the security settings but you will have to manually enter the values in the ArtiCAD diffuse section.

Let me know of any problems or additions you think I should make.

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This design shows what I have when the "Reference" value is set to 20. I lower the sky brightness to 0.3 to reduce noise as the View with lit appearance is more than enough to battle with the sun which is casting on the wood effect flooring in front of the window.... the View2 diffuse works out to 48.574 here for the window sized to 1490w x 1630h.
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Hi Daz, I've always been worried about upping my lit appearance to that amount, I find i get a lot of noise but reading your comments if i turn down the sun values that should remove the noise?
Thanks, Luke

Lukeh1101 wrote:Hi Daz, I've always been worried about upping my lit appearance to that amount, I find i get a lot of noise but reading your comments if i turn down the sun values that should remove the noise?
Thanks, Luke

Yes Luke
We cannot actually lower the Sun's brightness. The Sky rays cause most of the noise in our renders which is what we have control of with the intensity (Scale). Increasing the Window View's lit appearance is needed otherwise the sun is really the only light contributing and causes a high degree of contrast in our renders.

I've always wondered how we know what the gamma value is set to since it's just a sliding scale with no visible value anywhere?

magga wrote:I've always wondered how we know what the gamma value is set to since it's just a sliding scale with no visible value anywhere?

Yeah...for certain designs I leave the gamma alone. In TurboCAD I can specify actual values and these can be fixed and used again including rendering to a file image. The additional tone mapping controls in RedSDK 4.3 reduce the need to do it with the experiments I have been doing.

Gamma 2.2 is default for many Render Engines like Vray as it can really help out in large deep rooms without the need to add extra lighting when the physically correct lighting falls off.