Latest Update

Its been a while since the last update but a lot has happened. I made a lot of headway into diagnosing a lot of problems I was having with my renders. First of all, my carpet fur was killing my machine, so I nixed that. Next was the issue of ever present noise when I used my Portal Lights. that was a combination of two factors. The first being that EACH area light had to have shadow samples higher than 32. Second was the portal lights had to emit direct photons, which seemed strange to me since they aren't emitting photons at all, but it did the trick. Last was the fact that Phsy Sun and Sky had a very blue light emission coming into my scene. I was looking for a warmer color palette and using red/blue shift didn't help much with saturation, just made it a deep red instead. I found this nice little attribute called haze, and that did the trick of pulling a lot of that color out of the light. A lot of what I need to do now is tweak textures, increase my portal light multiplier and increase my GI photons as they're pretty low right now.

edit: Also, I should have thought of this earlier but the usual technique for creating a velvety material cannot be used with FG as incandescence is considered a light emission property. Thus the radioactive pillows. Need to fix that as well.

Interior Update

A lot of work this week in getting the GI just right. That, and finished up all textures and models. So from here on out its just tweaking lighting and post.

As you can see, several progress pictures. I enabled the map viz so I can try and get a better dispersion of photons. I'm not any good at blogs but these didn't upload in the correct order. Either way this is a slow progression. As you can see, I added a red cube in my scene to see how well the energy in my photons is being retained after a bounce.

I did find that it was my area lights causing my renders to become grainy. Im not entirely sure why that is, as I cranked up both my shadows and light samples (MR Area Light) to very very high numbers with no improvement. As such, I think I will be removing them, or just turn them into supplemental Maya area lights with no Portal light shader attached to it.

Interior Update

The last two weeks has been a lot of research into how to accomplish realistic interior lighting. I focused primarily on implementing a Linear workflow with Physical sun and Sky as well as portal lights. I have brushed up on my knowledge of FG and GI which is already decent, but there is always more to learn.

This first image was with a default Red/Blue shift of 0. 

I wanted an image a bit warmer, but I think I pushed it too far in this image. In this render, I have a Red/Blue Shift of 0.4

Update 2

Realistic Interior Update 1