constant reflectivity or nay?

[landscape archiberry 0]

Really getting into Renderworks and loving it. Lighting makes all the difference it seems...

Made some image props of plants, and at first I left constant reflectivity unchecked, because my Birch trees looked too grey -- all the white bark was lost. I raised the ambient light and that caused other problems. So I started making all my image props with constant reflectivity. Some look fairly cheesy, particularly flowering perennials.

Should I leave CR unchecked and put a lot of individual lighting around? And leave my ambient low? Any advice appreciated.

To CR or not CR...that is my question.

Thanks!

[Vincent C 22]

I've just found out that i've been using ambient where i should have been fiddeling with diffuse, i've never gotten my contrasts the way i want them to be.....try that, remember that you can adjust settings for ambient in both the image and in the render mode.....

[cad@sggsa 0]

Good day alchemilla

Constant Reflectivity is there to indicate lighting in most cases, like the image on a screen would be set to CR or on a lightbox panel...

seeing you only getting into RenderWorks now, start to play around with the Ambiant Lighting and adding say two Directional Lights, one light-blue and one light-yellow to reprasent the sky and sun.

I have always placed them to the bottom, left and right of the drawing, pointing 45deg to the centre.(hope you understand how this layout is set up)

Play around with the persentages of these lights where the ambiant works well at about 35%.

For a background use a two tone with lightblue ontop and white to the bottom to reprasent sky to start off with, but you could make your as explained in the recource for backgrounds thread on the forum.

Some of these topics have been discussed in depth on here, so go have a look.

[cad@sggsa 0]

To illustrate the difference between CR and not, here is a render of two screens.

The one on the left has a texture, Reflectivity set to Contant.

You would be able to set this when editing a texture.

I have been asked to also ilustrate what I meant with the way I have set up the Lighting.

Attached is a Plan view of my PRES Layer. The dimension is in milimeters of a floor surface, gives you an idea of distance between the lights and from the centre point of the drawing.

I almost forgot to mention...

Light info is:

Brightness 75%

Azimuth (-)45

Elevation 36.26

Only the blue is set to cast shadows.

[landscape archiberry 0]

Thanks for your in-depth answer and examples...this is just the kind of advice I need. I am trying the yellow and blue and getting good results for all the VW created surfaces. I need to go back and re-make all my image props without CR and then test the lighting on them.

As far as I can tell, there is no place where I can undo the reflectivity after creating a prop, true? No box to untick after the fact. I have to create the image prop again from scratch.

I will respond with a more informed reply when I have played with it a bit! I have not fiddled with diffusing light (I assume this is when creating your own textures/shaders) yet either. Much to learn.

Thanks for the help from both of you.

alchemilla

[Vincent C 22]

You should be able to change the CR setting in your present props.....i don't know how you created them but i'm guessing you created a polygon and gave it a material that is an image of the prop you want....if this is so you have a symbol of it in the resource browser somewhere, it also means you automatically have an image of the prop in the same file in textures, right click the image and choose edit, you can now adjust the settings as you like.

[Vincent C 22]

Another useful tip.....under view>lighting you can adjust ambient settings for the whole view, as well as inserting a 'sun' ...which is basically a directional light (good to know: if you do this more than once you get several 'suns')

[cad@sggsa 0]

That is correct, no need for re-creating the props, just edit them(their textures)

Go see View>Lighting>Set Layer Lighting Options:

There you det the ambiant light %, color and Temperature for the layer you are in, or you can switch it off (this you will most likely want to do when using a HDRI)

Have FNU!!