Reality Question Rendering Size

Dkgoose

When I render in Reality and to the smaller size image to adjust to my liking, and then render the image at a bigger size, but every time I render the picture bigger it's always darker than the smaller one, even though the settings are all the same. would I have to increase the lighting before rendering to get the same results? Thank You in advance for your time and replies.

cwichura

The target resolution should not make any difference on the lighting. Some ideas that come to mind:

1) Larger resolutions take longer to converge to a sufficient number of samples, and overall brightness will change a bit, particularly in the early stages of convergence
2) You are using one of the auto tonemappers (Reinheart, etc.). You really shouldn't ever do this. Always set it to linear and explicitly configure the ISO/shutter/aperture. (And you can set this on the camera tab within Reality as well so you don't have to always set it within LuxRender).

StratDragon

@DKGoose
unless your re-scaling your scene your lights are the same. you may need to adjust the "exposure" depending on your settings in LuxRender and when you make a memory intensive render it can take a few moments to see the adjustment on screen. Increasing your render image size in Lux can seriously impact that memory use and response time.

@cwichura

2) You are using one of the auto tonemappers (Reinheart, etc.). You really shouldn’t ever do this. Always set it to linear and explicitly configure the ISO/shutter/aperture. (And you can set this on the camera tab within Reality as well so you don’t have to always set it within LuxRender).

Why not? I do this all the time when I do indoor shots and adjust as needed and get some great lighting results without guessing at exposure times. I'm not saying your wrong I just don't know the reason that "you really shouldn't ever do this."

FSMCDesigns

StratDragon said:

@cwichura

2) You are using one of the auto tonemappers (Reinheart, etc.). You really shouldn’t ever do this. Always set it to linear and explicitly configure the ISO/shutter/aperture. (And you can set this on the camera tab within Reality as well so you don’t have to always set it within LuxRender).

Why not? I do this all the time when I do indoor shots and adjust as needed and get some great lighting results without guessing at exposure times. I'm not saying your wrong I just don't know the reason that "you really shouldn't ever do this."

Probably purely due to being technical and having complete control over the lighting, I am the same way, always use linear myself and hand adjust.

cwichura

Auto exposure modes in Lux tend to get very confused when you have multiple light sources. Especially when some of those light sources are visible within the render itself (e.g., lighting effects for scifi/fantasy/flame/etc). To properly balance lighting ratios, you need a fixed, known exposure on the camera.

mjc1016

cwichura said:

Auto exposure modes in Lux tend to get very confused when you have multiple light sources. Especially when some of those light sources are visible within the render itself (e.g., lighting effects for scifi/fantasy/flame/etc). To properly balance lighting ratios, you need a fixed, known exposure on the camera.

And two things that can happen...longer render times, because the lights are not being properly taken into account. The other is under/over exposure (usually under, as the auto stuff adjusts to the brightest lights around). And sometimes you can get unnatural 'clipping' or some fireflies that just won't go away.

Sometimes, they are useful...usually with a single light source, though.

Dkgoose

thanks for the replies, I'm not sure what my settings are at the moment, I think I'm using Max White, I think it might have lightened up after about 8 hours of rendering, but not much, I'll check more when I get home to see if it's lightened up anymore. As for using just Linear, I'll start using that from now on, I just don't want to mess up my current image as I like the color, it's just darker

TheKD

I noticed the same thing in poser reality. I thought I was screwing something up, since I am new to reality. I really need to wait on a more powerful PC for reality to be useful I think. I only have a dualcore.

StratDragon

Try using the "auto" button on non-linear to get a good balance between light and dark and you can adjust your exposure and/or gamma to bring it to it's potential. Little tweaks go a long way I've found.
you can also adjust the film types and get some really cool color results, I just started using it recently and I have no idea why I was reluctant to use it in the first place.

@TheKD
Yes, Dual Core is going to really be pushing itself to it's limits on simple stuff and those limits will become very obvious. It will work, but it will struggle. The extra $$ on a Quad Core and a Multi Threaded Quad Core is worth the price if you plan to upgrade and use LuxRender but your still looking at hours of render time on a CPU render even with monster rigs. If you keep your old computer you can add it to the render effort as long as it has the RAM to render as if it was doing the render by itself. I often use my Dual Core MacPro as a complement to my Quad Core i7 Windows on renders and it does help.

Dkgoose

ya, the bigger images take forever, I got Reality when it was first released here, and the update, but never used it as much, mostly because my last computer was so problematic i couldn't even load a figure without crashing, but it works good on my pc i have now, so trying to relearn and learn more about the program and learn how to do my own lighting, the film i have fun playing around with and switching between them, some interesting results sometimes