Once the basic material and the glass was applied, I brought in the start file contents I made during the internship – namely an empty scene with a VRayPlane (an infinite blank plane), VRayLight (set as a dome with an attached Peter Guthrie HDRI) and a VRaySun. After aiming the sun at a side-on angle to the building, I (believed I) was ready to get on and start getting some test renders out so I could test basic lighting, reflections and so on.
However, every time I tried to render, all I got was a blank white screen. It was perplexing. So I went back to one of the scenes I made during the summer, and did a quick test render. As it contained quite literally tens of millions of polys, and I had all the settings still up at max (stupidly) it crashed my laptop – but before it did so, I was able to see the light cache was giving perfectly good results. It was rendering fine.
So I brought in the start file contents into a new blank scene, slapped on a quick brick texture to a cube, put in a VRayPhysicalCamera, set it to view and tried a test render, and…
GLORIOUS SUCCESS!
…realised my project was done and that this was the greatest piece of work I’d ever created.
I kid – I realised I’d been a numpty again – the reason my test renders were coming out white was because I had been trying to render from perspective view, not a camera. Schoolboy error. Ah well – it’d been several months since I’d had to render anything.
Now I knew what was going wrong, I went back, and with all the settings suitably low I tried again.
Hooray!
For the ground and exterior area, I slapped on a quick Arroway texture I had on me from the internship (https://www.arroway-textures.ch/) from their Tiles: Volume One pack – some hexagonal tiles. It obviously won’t remain exactly like this, this is purely for testing purposes.
I was fairly happy with the initial render, considering it just had 2 raw materials on it. Main issues I noted:
- Everything appears washed out, yet the lighting is generally on the low-side camera settings need tweaking to sort this
- Paving, whilst placeholder and not tweaked at all, is very bland and gray
- Some seriously messed up refractions happening in the front and left windows – almost certainly down to the fact the glass is heavily curved for those. Lowering the IOR might lower the effect of this.
- Camera is obviously too high – needs to be corrected to eye-level to make it more believable, and dramatic.
Next post: more rendering fun!
Stuart McInnes 