Archives for February, 2008
Theater Render: Experimenting with HDR & Tone Mapping
Friday, February 1st, 2008
Update: I wasn’t too happy with the sampling in the previous image (anti-aliasing and FG blotchyness) so I cranked up the settings and let it render overnight.
The render time was about 3 hours, compared to the earlier image which came in at only 10 min. -A huge amount of time for only a little gain, imo. There are still some artifacts that are bugging me too: The glossy reflections still have some grain even though the sampling on the material reflections was set to 64 (versus 8 in the previous image), and the anti-aliasing is still jagged (pixel sampling set at 256/16 versus 64/1 in the latter image). Am I missing something here?
Below is the older image I’m referring to with the 10 minute render time and lower samplings. I tone-mapped this one by hand, whereas, the above image was tone-mapped using Photoshop CS2’s “Automate | Merge to HDR…” from the File menu (with a little hand-tweaking to bring out the chairs a bit more). I found it interesting how the ‘Merge to HDR’ gave the image a little more warmth.
A little bit of info on the project: This theater was designed around Senator Palpatine’s Office from Star Wars. The room is small as well as the budget (relatively speaking) for a full blown themed Star Wars theater, but I did what I could to make it all work.
The faux windows are looking out into Coruscant. The image is printed onto fabric and framed with a custom profile. -These images wrap around the back of the room (most of it isn’t shown). I modeled and rendered the entire city from scratch with 3ds max and Mental Ray. The biggest issue was rendering out the image at a decent resolution without crashing max. The final size is going to be roughly 22,000 x 3000 px. This was accomplished with plenty of blood, sweat, and tears but I finally cracked the code. I went through about 4 or 5 different plugins and scrips that render out the image in segments, but the only thing that cranked out the segments without crashing was doing it by hand using the ‘Blow-up Region’ and ‘Sub Region’ controls under ‘Viewport Configuration’.
So… If anyone ever needs help rendering huge images, let me know -I’ve been to hell and back on that topic.
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