Smooth, Polished Floors

I'm currently using IRender nXt. I want my floor plans to look smoother and more polished. Ive attached a jpeg of my rendering and another of what i want mine to look like. I was curious if IRender nXt could do this.

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Permalink Reply by Richcat on September 28, 2012 at 5:03am

No jpeg?

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Permalink Reply by Render Plus on September 28, 2012 at 3:23pm

I am getting ready to reply to this, and left the initial email to remind me. I will add my own JPEG's in a minute.

Here is part of the JPEG of the desired result from the original email. (I did not want to post the whole thing without permission)

I am planning a response with some examples of reflection and sharpness settings, and also a comment that the image above had a number of lights (perhaps some invisible pointing at walls, etc.) to achieve the effect.

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Permalink Reply by Richcat on September 28, 2012 at 3:46pm

Sorry Al (typical englishman) - just me being impatient with the little time I had help @the time, and wanted to see what was required, having done a few in the past.

http://api.ning.com/files/aXmiLyTilCrFjdibVI6bJJ0qyHSFOPC6oGBaZaVhn...

Its very important to get the texture right, and detailed first

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Permalink Reply by Render Plus on September 29, 2012 at 7:05am

Here is a smaller Richcat's version of Richcat's image:

There are several things which effect the final image:

1. Choice of material for floor. It needs to be of a high enough resolution to make a good image.

2. Lighting - here he is using sunlight and sky. The image from the original user uses interior lights - but has a lot of lights to make more reflections on the floor.

3. Reflection setting on the material - how reflective to make it

4. Sharpness setting - 1.00 makes a mirror like reflection. Lower numbers like 0.50 make a more realistic, blurry reflection.

5. Number of rendering passes. To get a good, blurry reflection, you need to use 100s or even 1,000's of rendering passes. (Richcat used 555 passes to get this effect)

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Permalink Reply by Render Plus on September 30, 2012 at 10:57pm

To achieve a smooth floor effect, you will probably need to experimet a bit with lighting, reflectivity of the floow material and sharpness of the floor material.

Here is a 60% reflective floor with 100% sharpness (no blur), and three ceiling lights:

Notice that the reflection is very sharp - just like a mirror.

Here I left the reflection at 0.60, but lowered the sharpness to 0.80

Now the reflection of the lights and the reflection of the door on the floor start to get blurry. This was rendered for 20 passes. The blur would smooth out with more passes, but the sive of the reflection area would not change much.

Next, I dropped the sharpness to 0.60 and let it render for 60 passes to smooth it out more.

Now the reflection of the lights is much more subtle.

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Permalink Reply by shayne pasternak on October 1, 2012 at 10:46am

Thanks for making me this post Al. For my floor plans i need to put 13 glow on everything to make all white walls and make every thing even. I cant do glow and reflection. Its one or the other right ? You used high dynamic right ?

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Permalink Reply by Render Plus on October 1, 2012 at 11:26am

If you notice, in the image we are trying to replicate (3rd post in this thread), the walls are not solid white. If they were, the brighter areas of the walls would not show (They are not able to be brighter than white) Instead they brightened the wall - probably by shining an invisible spot light at it.

You can't make everything "even" and still expect it to look realistic.

Try applying less glow to things (5% ro 10% rather than 20%) and you will probably be able to see both glow and reflections.

In this image I placed reflection on both rectangles, (60% reflection, 80$ sharpness), but 20% glow only to the rectangle in front of Susan. Glow and reflection can work together - but you need to keep the level of the glow low enough so that the reflection can still brighten things up.

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Permalink Reply by shayne pasternak on October 1, 2012 at 11:39am

is there away to can email you a plan, so you can see what i am talking about ? Its tough to balance out the light

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Permalink Reply by shayne pasternak on October 1, 2012 at 12:37pm

Do you put a ceiling on and make it invisible ?

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Permalink Reply by Render Plus on October 1, 2012 at 1:11pm

Send a plan to support@renderplus.com and we will use one of the rooms for an example. I will plan to post the resultant images here on the forum if that is OK.

This will all take some trial and error to get the balance right.

The three images with the stove, table and door had a ceiling and used a SketchUp Section Plane to let us see through it. In IRender nXt, (unlike SketchUp), so light passes through a section plane, so the ceiling lights can be used to illuminate the scene. If you were to just hide the ceiling, the ceiling lights would also be hidden, and the sun and sky light would illuminate the scene.

Here is an example using a section plane to hide the front wall. But the wall and windows behind the section plane still cast shadows on the floor.