Industrial Liquid Metal Drill: Basic Lightwave & Maxwell GI Renders

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SA9R

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Attached is an image of the basic scene, no fluids yet, using the basic GI solver in LW and MXR.

It seemed neat to recreate a scene from a photo of a liquid metal drilling warehouse since it would use both hard surface modeling and fluid simulation. It would also use in-door lighting which could have interesting atmospheric lighting from relatively minimal light sources.

The LW render is more moody with its high contrast, though increasing the bounces and intensity from 10 bounces at 100% would change that, mainly by increasing the intensity. The MXR render has more even light distribution, with better surface realism.

The MXR render is a finer render (SL 18) because it is GPU-based, which means it reached a more detailed sampling level than LW could (180-540 Adaptive Sampling).

Maybe worth a look.

 
Definitely better looking Maxwell renderer, but that said..It seems surfaces isn´t set up properly in the Lightwave renderer, I am sure you can get similar results within the Lightwave renderer, may take a little more work though, but hard to tell without light info for the scene, nor surface settings.
 
Lightwave's default surface editors usually do not get me what I am looking for in a texture. Some of the settings in PBR seem to have no effect at all, and the Standard shader seems to have a wonky implementation of the reflection channel now. I should try the Node Editor, though I think that would only allow greater flexibility and complexity of shading rather than a different implementation of the reflection channel. I should check firsthand for myself though.

The Lightwave render looks near to a photo in the upper, back left of the ceiling. I know Lightwave can do great things, but these low-light GI scenes are notoriously difficult to work with because of the sparse light and high sampling and GI bounce requirements. So, all done for now with renders and back to modeling, texturing and simulating the coolant/lubricant fluid for the metal drill.

The final scene setup will have more light sources so renders should not be too difficult to work with a that point.
 
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Here are a couple more renders from overnight, with lighting settings.



Directional Light: 800%
GI Bounce: 3
GI Intensity: 150%



Directional Light: 100%
GI Bounce: 8
GI Intensity: 800%

The first results for LWR in the first post seem better than these, though these are interesting enough just to see what LW is doing with the given settings.
 
SA9R said:
Here are a couple more renders from overnight, with lighting settings.



Directional Light: 800%
GI Bounce: 3
GI Intensity: 150%



Directional Light: 100%
GI Bounce: 8
GI Intensity: 800%

The first results for LWR in the first post seem better than these, though these are interesting enough just to see what LW is doing with the given settings.
Click to expand...

The thing is, the maxwell render show surfacing as somewhat metallic, the Lightwave rendering don´t..so not sure what kind of materials you have set for the machine, the pipes that runs vertically etc, they should reflect something, just compare to that of the maxwell renderer.
 


Camera Properties:
Minimum Samples 2018 w/ no AS.

All Surface Channel and Light Samples: 1

Render Properties: Render
All Ray Recursion Limits: 64
Ray Precision: 10

Render Properties: GI
GI Diffuse Bounces: 3
GI Intensity: 100%
GI Rays: 1

Directional Light: 400%

Surface Editor: Standard Shader
Diffuse: 95%
Specular: 25%
Glossiness: 5%
Reflection: 3%

A little closer to the MXR render, but the surface reflection for the material is not as good. I had to put it at 3% because it immediately gets very strong highlights without much of anything else showing up in the reflections. It does not seem like a balanced set of data being displayed for reflections. Hotspots too quick and notable lack of the rest without the reflections being generally overly pronounced.

Might try a PBR shader, but I did not like what I was getting with those settings even less than with the Standard shader.

Edit: 2018 AA Samples w/ no AS.
 
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The GI did get a lot brighter, and took significantly longer, with the reflections active. Many more bounces. Closer to MXR.
 
SA9R said:



Might try a PBR shader, but I did not like what I was getting with those settings even less than with the Standard shader.
Click to expand...

Just Don´t use the standard shader for this, get in to learning the PBR shader, it will just give you headaches trying to match the surfacing in the maxwell renderer.
I know for sure that I could just boost up the surfaces on the whole thing here, but skip the standard material, learn to use PBR and Control the metallic settings, maybe some anisotrophy as well.

Directional light, Inside?...Just don´t use it, Unless a big window with sunlight coming in..skip it, use area lights or ngon lights, and HDR imaging maybe combined with that to get reflections.

At first PBR may seem to be difficult to get where you want it, but is superior if you know how to tweak it right.


 
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conductor material would also be one step better than standard as well, but even so, principled I think is better to go with, it´s designed to work with the newer engine and lights.




And this one from Jarno who was working with the development of the render engine...

Timestamped at metallic look and additional anisotrophy effects (requires setting up projection map or uv map)

 


I thought that the reflections would brighten things up, but no. Too high contrast, overall. The ceiling at the back is almost black. Did add some metalicness. The "rec709" color space helped bring the image data into the mid-range, but that was all.

Surface settings were:
Roughness: 50%
Specular: 100%
Metalic: 100%
 

safety gif

Surface:
Roughness: 25%
Specular: 100%
Metalic: 80%

Light: Directional: 800%

GI: Bounces: 8
GI: Intensity: 100%

Probably the last one of these GI renders so that I can finish the scene.
 
There was an in-between version, but it was not great either and the LWR was not simulating motion blur even with LWOs.



Final render will probably be in MXR to see whether motion blur can be done there.
 

how to share pictures

Added fire sprinkler heads and pipes. Hard to even see the sprinkler heads so it is good that they were not modeled more than they were.

There is better light distribution in this render by using a combination of the rec709 color space and a Black Point of 200% in the Image Controls. The environment light was toned down to 75% to prevent any bloom. And the GI intensity was increased to 175% to let the light noticeably extend into the darker areas despite the lower environment light intensity.
 


Larger sprinklers. About as visible as they are going to get for this scene.
 
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Final render for the geometry.

Not sure whether I'll texture it.

I am quite surprised that I could not get a good metal appearance in the LWR with the mostly GI lighting environment.
 
SA9R said:


Final render for the geometry.

Not sure whether I'll texture it.

I am quite surprised that I could not get a good metal appearance in the LWR with the mostly GI lighting environment.
Click to expand...
I think you may be doing something wrong with the surficing as well as the lighting..you should be able to get a better metal look than that.
 
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