Topic: Moved: Pixelated reflections

[Morten]

Moved from Frank's competition rendering thread:
http://lumion3d.com/forum/index.php?topic=2026.0

By "grainy", do you mean pixelated?

[SEVERINO]

Hi Morten,
As this forum talking a lot of reflections, I want to send me what happens in curved crystals mainly
I get Fixel reflexes and the effect is very unpleasant.

Have a solution to implement in the current build 7 Sp2 64-bit?
Or at least some type of lighting, smoothing, and so on.?

I use max for models and FBX export as files.

Regards

[Frank]

By "grainy", do you mean pixelated?

Yes, pixelated. Excuse my bad english.

[Morten]

We are well aware of the fact that a blur setting is required for the cubemap reflection texture, but the pixelation on your rendering looks rather strange. Which graphics card did you render this image with? A Quadro card?

Here's what it's supposed to look like (rendered in 3-star mode and Settings -> "Low Mem" mode should be turned off):

[Frank]

@Morten
The pixelated reflections i described looked like the ones in the cube at your rendering.

[Morten]

Ok, so it's only Severino who is experiencing the weird artifacts so far...

We are obviously aware of the fact that the resolution of cubemap reflection texture and a lack of blur cause reflections to appear pixelated, but something else seems to be wrong on Severino's rendering.

[Morten]

Thanks for confirming this, Daz - would you mind emailing me the Documents/LumionFree/Scene & Library files, so we can try to reproduce it? (morten [at] quest3d.com)

[SEVERINO]

Hello everyone,
I love challenges, if they are surmountable. Last night I started researching the problem of curved pixelated of my models and finally: THE SOLUTION. The problem lies in the smoothness of the model, ie before generating the export file, the model should be smoothed.

Here you have the result:

Thank you for your interest
Regards

[Morten]

That's good news, Severino - thanks for your persistence

@Daz: Could you try to follow Severino's advice, ie weld any co-positional vertices and apply smoothing to the model before exporting it again please? As you probably know, you can re-load the model without losing the material settings if you follow the "Importing and Updating Settings" section in the Tips & Tricks thread:
http://lumion3d.com/forum/index.php?topic=638.0

[Morten]

Which application are you using if you don't mind me asking?

[Morten]

Hi Dazomatic, the way you are describing the rendering "sequence" as if "the last step is missing" is not how real-time 3D graphics work, but I can see why you jumped to that conclusion.

Anyway, I am not familiar with the DAE/FBX(?) export options in Ulead Cool3D, but it seems that the smoothing groups are not exported from Cool3D - or not imported correctly in Lumion.

To determine if the problem stems from Cool3D or the Lumion importer, there are two things you could do to help solve this problem:

A) Please post screenshots of the export settings in Cool3D, so that we can find out if any of the export file format(s) support smoothing groups.

B) If we fail to find a solution, you'll have to create a simple (smooth) sphere in Cool3D, export it to FBX/DAE (or whichever format you use) and send it to "Artur [at] quest3d.com" (Please note that we have got an Artur and an Arthur at Act-3D, so the way you spell that name is important ). Write "Missing smoothing groups in Cool3D" in the subject line and make sure you provide a link to this thread. He will be able to examine the exported data and determine if the smoothing group information is included in the file or not, ie, if the problem is caused by the Cool3D exporter or by the importer in Lumion.

If you would like to learn more about smoothing groups, please check out this video:

[Morten]

One thing at a time, you're talking about two different things here

1) The problem with reflections that you and Severino reported:
As Severino mentioned, the problem was actually caused by the fact that his original model did not have any smoothing groups.

I've had a look at the .3ds files you uploaded earlier today and the same thing applies to your models: The models do not include smoothing groups in any of the 3D applications I've loaded your .3ds files in.

In other words, the problem is actually in Cool3D, so you'll have to explore the export options in that application to find out if a) you can turn on "Smoothing groups" in the .3ds export file dialogue window or b) export to another format, preferably FBX or DAE (Collada) files.

2) The shadows on the sink:
What you're seeing is normal behaviour in Lumion when shadows are almost parallel to a large surface. It doesn't matter which application the model was exported from, but what does matter is:

1) How detailed the model is, ie, how many polygons the curved surface consists of and...
2) How big the polygons are.

The sink in your example uses very few polygons (and is presumably big?) and as you can see on the rendering below, all you need to do to fix this is to add more detail to the curved segments (and/or scale it down if it's larger than usual?).

[Morten]

P.S. To make things more complicated, there's another factor which has an impact on the way shadows look on polygons that are almost parallel to the sun rays:
Weather -> Advanced Weather -> Shadow -> Clipping

[Morten]

The monkey head that they're using to demonstrate subdivisions is the famous Suzanne model from Blender:
http://www.blender.org/

Another (free) alternative is Sculptris:
http://www.pixologic.com/sculptris/

[Frank]

Thanks for all that good hints, Morten!