So I have a little problem I can’t find any solution for.
I guess it is absolutely easy, but I don’t find it.
Now the problem is that the inside of the car is much to dark. I think there is somewhere an option to let the enviroment reflect more light naturaly. I don’t want to use a light source inside the car.
I don’t want to increse the strengh of the lightsource to much so the background doesn’t get to bright.
Do you have any idea how to fix this?
Bellow you see the material for the windows, I made. Maybe there is an issue allready.
It’s because of the glass shader, you should not use it for windows
Glass shader should be used for non flat glass pieces like a rounded glass object, bulb, sphere, chess pawn, etc…
But for a flat or almost flat object like a window, you will add nothing but noise and render time.
Use a mix of transparent, and glossy, it will be much better, and by the way it will fix your lighting issue
So greenOJ, I am a noob in shading and have no idea where to actually change the settings you said
Do I have to use the lighpath node in every material?
And thanks tricotou
I changed the window material, and it became a bit better, but still doesn’t look natural:
Only for those containing refraction, as refraction shader is opaque to rays. If you use transparency, that one is transparent to rays (with its color), but that causes issues with fresnel - backfacing faces needs to have inverted IOR. Search for my name and glass, has been discussed before.
But the main problem still remains. For example I have a texture on the seats. It is not visible. But when you look into your own car, even on a shady day, you can see the seats textures.
Try photographing instead of looking by the eye. How does the inside look from the outside when exposed for the outside and inside. And then from the inside, exposed for the outside and inside.
But yeah, a file to look at would be preferred. Replace background and car with simple geometry (but keep the window material and geometry “style”), and keep the lighting.
Okay here is the file how it is at the moment. I hope it isn’t to large.
I want to mention that the car is NOT mine. I have bought the model.
So please do not copy it.
It seems to mainly just be the fact that the scene isn’t very bright to begin with and the lack of ambient occlusion (or what blender calls ambient occlusion, which really is ambient lighting). I did some small fixes (solidified the windows, enabled ambient occlusion, switched to filmic color transform and made the lights brighter): dropbox.com/s/ftnwu2dqvwg4uxm/?dl=1
Wow Amazing what you have done.
I guess therefor this Thread reached it’s goal. But maybe you want to wrtie a final reply on what to change to achieve that result. After all this might be googled by someone else later on and this thread could answer a lot.
Thou these tricks, like ambient occlusion, filmic color and stuff, might be confusing to noobies like me. (I have to check what you changed to understand myself)
The one you mention and the simple light path trick isn’t correct though. Glass will cast shadow - if you look at glass at glancing angles it won’t be very transparent, pretty much only reflective - light would experience this too (I’m ignoring volume absorption). Setup a clear drinking glass in the sun, you can still see the shadow of the rim. Thin panes are easy enough (just make sure to invert the fresnel IOR for backfacing faces). Solid panes you need to mask the double shadow - since I only use it for solids with varying geometry, I just add a power to the fresnel curve until the double shadow goes away but giving a more solid edge.
Edit: Not that my method is correct, it’s only improved. Only using caustics will make it correct (if you let it run for long enough).
@CarlG
There is something curious about glass, rendered in Cycles. It behaves not like glass in nature.
In nature, there will be bundled light, a lensing effect… Other areas dont get as much light , they appear darker. Thats how glass shadows are generated.
We could see how cycles creates glass shadows with an experiment.
A simple glass sphere. We are used to it.
Cycles, IOR ← 1.5, Shadows supported
If we set IOR to 1, something interesting happens.
Cycles, IOR ← 1, Shadows supported
Sphere became invisible. But there is a shadow. If we disable shadow rays, the shadow disappears. Now, Sphere truly disappeared.
Playing with shadow ray switch we could see, Cycles does not create shadows by bundling light rays (depriving shadow areas from light rays). Cycles uses shadow rays.
But I think, you are right. It does have a price to disable shadow rays. This glass wont render shadows at all.
If someone likes to have a more accurate glass material, Cycles might not be the right choice. There are some renderers (like Luxcore, Appleseed) which do a better job there.
This “lensing effect” is due to something called caustics. It’s something we can enable in Cycles - it’s correct (afaik) but takes ages to compute. For panes of glass, thin or with fixed thickness - compared to a glass sphere or varied thickness glass, there is no need to rely on caustics.
IOR=1 means both the object and its surroundings are of the same material, so there should be no shadows. A pocket of air in air doesn’t create shadows (or reflections).
Correct, Cycles is not great (not even remotely) for accurate - or rather fast - caustics simulations. That still doesn’t mean we can’t cheese it. It won’t look as good as the real thing of course, but completely stripping away shadows can look really really weird and unnatural.
