Material Settings Help. Washed out render (again...)

No matter how much I play around with settings, I cant get white to render without looking washed out. Also struggling to let the door detail show on the black centre island cabinets. Does anyone have any advice/tips?

I followed Daz's advice before and reduced all the sun settings, saturation etc right down and this has helped slightly but feel I could still get it looking much better! The brass handles aren't looking great either......

Thanks

Jayne, that looks stunning!!!

I'd be really happy with a render like that, although you're right about the brass, it doesn't look that brassy.

I find ArtiCAD struggles with white when you've got white or light grey next to it. What RGB are you using for the white?

TBH black and white are the two most troublesome shades to deal with, I usually have to experiment with different shades to get them right.

That's plenty good enough Jayne!
Present it to the clients and take their £100k !   (what ever that kitchen costs)


I can't offer much help, but could you do a couple of close up detail renders of key elements, rather than trying to get the light/colour balance right on the whole image? along with a wide shot or two like the above it should be a great presentation.

As mentioned above I would look at the RGB and texture settings on your white materials and check they are spot on.

Looks good Jayne.... getting to critical like we all do eh...

I notice that the first tall oven housing has different material settings.... Is that a raw render without any post editing by the way?

Dave had a plan he emailed me which like yours, is a large room with may openings and these can be problematic with the tools, or rather the lack of lighting tools in ArtiCAD... These rooms would also be problematic for a photographer with sun entering and how light falls off across the large distance. If you can control the sky ray brightness separate from the sun like I can in TurboCAD it does help because sky rays do not fall off but spread out the further away geometry is from the opening it's coming in from. I would often setup a sun box blocker to control with it's materials transparency reduce and even adding a bit of colour to warm up the lower sun brightness (obviously remember to untick "let light through for it of course).

Also think how a photographer would setup his camera as The RedSDK Render Engine is based on true lighting and material physics and the tone mapping is the same as a cameras. Like with Dave's using some internal window graphics and positioning them to create a camera flash and fill lighting to help with catching highlights on handles and corners really can help.

I have also been using a more detailed render setting for the Global Illumination to improve the quality of shadows and detail catching by reducing the error value - 0.0065 is just enough for most renders without causing to much extra render time/crashing and also shadow bubbling.... it reduced the light leaks the sun and some light generate:

Daz, this is great but I dont have access to the advanced settings option?

Jaynehiddleston wrote:Daz, this is great but I dont have access to the advanced settings option?

download this to update your presets ;-)

There is also a couple included for you to few your lighting without the tone mapping..... if you have never seen an un-tonemapped render you will be suprised what it looks like without any.... gives you a good idea of the interior lighting and dark places of your renders so you can have more of an idea what to do either by altering brightness of your lights or add additional ones to even it out a bit.... have fun :-) Just download the attached xml file and unzip it and drop into your ArtiCAD folder to overwrite the existing one....
If you have ArtiCAD running close it and restart it for the new settings to be available in the dropdown as shown below.
I will update it again to have TM off but Skylight on also soon...

Nice render Jayne. Too critical as usual.    Articad lighting is not great as Daz said the more windows the bigger the problem. Using Blender you realise just how few options articad gives us for lighting. Also as Mitch said do some lifestyle views. A lot of good interior cad artists all say the same thing....Don't try and get the whole scene in the one shot! 

Def use the higher Daz presets. You will see a difference!

Daz, Tried that medium setting on this room which has a few windows and double doors in the room. Noise and the dreaded blotching. Back to Daz Highest! Just about given up hope of v21 ever being a version i can trust. Still getting crashing and the biggest pain in the arse going back to a design and most of the materials have reverted to defaults! Slowly getting sick of the new material editor! V20 still the best version to be on! Rant over!!

Joe wrote:Daz, Tried that medium setting on this room which has a few windows and double doors in the room. Noise and the dreaded blotching. Back to Daz Highest! Just about given up hope of v21 ever being a version i can trust. Still getting crashing and the biggest pain in the arse going back to a design and most of the materials have reverted to defaults! Slowly getting sick of the new material editor! V20 still the best version to be on! Rant over!!

Is V21 out in the wild as yet, or is it still being tested on us tethered goats?

Full field of goats! Think some are ok with it as long as you stay within the defaults but for me who needs higher quality it's failing on a few issues still. Hq model imports and some lit appearance is reducing it to a crawl and crashes!

Joe -  I was going to updated over xmas..... you think i should just stick on V20? and yes, doing some lifestyle shots now, looks much better and more authentic already

I would say as a user that is happy with 'out the box' materials - I have a few F&B colour set up and some Silestone worktop material made and just a few imported props/chair/pendant models here and there - it's working well for me and I have no issues with crashing or running slow anymore.

If you are using a lot of custom materials, lighting, models etc , then I would be taking Joe's advice.

far from perfect but much better for detail

Jaynehiddleston wrote:

far from perfect but much better for detail

Looks super Jayne....

I really think you are being too self-critical Jayne, it looks amazing!

Jayne, You could install in different path so you have the option to run both. I get sent a lot of v21 files from clients and the amount of errors i'm getting mean i usually have to re-draw in v20 just to get the job done. Articad has never really worked when transferring files between systems. I think they have something in-house that saves everything but won't let the users have it. If doing a clean install with all new cat's and only using the default materials then yes it should run fine. Quick note don't install any new cat's in v20 they will not work!!

Joe wrote:Daz, Tried that medium setting on this room which has a few windows and double doors in the room. Noise and the dreaded blotching. Back to Daz Highest! Just about given up hope of v21 ever being a version i can trust. Still getting crashing and the biggest pain in the arse going back to a design and most of the materials have reverted to defaults! Slowly getting sick of the new material editor! V20 still the best version to be on! Rant over!!

Hi Joe,
Oh dear, I think this is mainly due to where the portals are positioned and the lit appearance is really on the wrong side of it (should switch places). RedSDK can have the portals to help out clean up luminances (Lit Appearance in ArtiCAD) so reducing the need to have Daz Highest... Like in TC I use a thin box and the properties are set with these options ticked):