I tried to attach the files but the 5 MB limit stopped me (it's 31 mb). I have uploaded the file to my Dropbox folder and am sharing it. You should be able to download the zip file to your computer using the link below and see the contents. If there's a better way to upload this, please let me know.
I hope someone can help me out. I was trying to lecture over creating a night rendering of a playhouse in my class this morning. I used the same steps as in the past but the SketchUp file will just not render properly. The PowerPoint lecture basically shows the students the steps I used for the past couple of years to create a night scene of a playhouse project. I use an hdr file (for atmosphere) as well as a jpg (for background). The lecture shows what I had been able to produce in the past - really nice.
This year, not so much. The zip file has the night-scene.skp file for you to examine. After I do the steps per the lecture I get current-night-scene.jpg. It looks like the sky doesn't want to appear - even though I did the exact same steps as in the lecture and as I've always done before. It also seems that the file reverts to the rnl_prbe.hdri.
What really throws me off as well is that a student was able to get the background to appear. Her files, night-scply.skp and her result: night-scply.jpg, are in the zip file. In her scene, the sky is visible but the scene appears as if on a sunny day! And on the ground in front of the playhouse is the jpg of the fullmoon! Strange!
There must be something, some setting, I'm missing. All suggestions will be greatly appreciated. Thank you for your time.
Replies
So...how many other powerpoints full of rendering instructions and tips do you have to share?
Rich,
I have about three PowerPoints for IRendernXt for SketchUp. I use them as guides for my students in my SketchUp class. The first PowerPoint is general stuff about lighting and materials, the second is the night rendering which is in the zip file and the last is setting up a 360 degree view. Actually I am working on a Word doc mini-guide for my students covering most of the settings for IRender nXt (pretty much everything except hdri settings). I'll probably be done with it later this month. I was hoping to post it if that's OK with you.
That full moon image is really placed on the ground there in her model.
If you rotate the image and look below the grass, you'll see it:
Rich,
Thanks for your speedy replies. The student must have imported the jpg at first instead of her playhouse model! That explains the funny jpg file in her render. I will caution my students about this in the future.
The nice thing about sending us jpegs is that we can open them in our RPS_ImageQuery.exe viewer (in the bin_Nxt folder in our installation folder) and look at the settings used to render the image, as below:
Then I can use the copy button in that viewer to copy the "statistics" from both images and see what's different.
Here's a screenshot of what I see different (We use Araxis Merge to compare text files.):
Your image, the stats on the right, has the rnl_probe selected as the HDRi sky, hers is the fullmoon.hdr.
She has Sky Visibility On, your have it Off.
She has CustomVisibilitySky Off, while you have it On.
She has Indirect Lighting On, and you don't.
It's probably just a matter of comparing the Visibility checkbox on the Background tab, and the Sky checkbox on the Presets tab. Maybe turn the Background ON so we see it and not the HDRi sky.
When we added the new Preset option to the Presets tab, we may have changed the way the options are set for each preset. I know that if you click on Studio-High Dynamic, we set the HDRi to be rnl_probe, but I think we've always done that.
I'll follow the steps of your PowerPoint and see what I come up with.
I'll use the model that you sent, and will hopefully see what the odd full moon image on the ground is.
I'm not sure why my model settings didn't stay. I basically do the same steps in the lecture along with my students. We run the render program together. After your posts, I re-rendered at home the exact file I sent you with the same settings as the lecture and got the image below. It works at home. I wonder if there's a setting change from last year in the classroom computer. I will investigate this further on Monday.
I was able to get to the dropbox by copying the link above and pasting it into my browser address bar.
For some reason just clicking on the link in the discussion didn't work for me...
I'll take a look.