Improvements to Physically Based Rendering

[Illes Papp]

The Physically Based Rendering Experimental Feature is improved with the following new features:

1. Procedural Sky - The newly introduced Procedural Sky generates a sky dome with an accurately positioned Sun disc which affects not only the background but also the lighting of the scene.
2. Shadow Mapping - Shadow mapping produces much faster results than shadow volumes, with soft shadow edges.
3. Automatic Exposure Control and Bloom Effect - Exposure is automatically controlled, similar to real life cameras. High luminance regions generate a so called “blooming“ effect.
4. Improved Ambient Occlusion - Previously certain areas of 3D scenes introduced some artifacts, and with the improvements these are not appearing any more (available from Archicad 27 Update 2).

For more details, please read the following reference:
Visualization - Graphisoft Community

Looking forward to having your much appreciated feedbacks, questions and insights.

[abdelaziz]

Hi,

I have an AMD RX 6750xt graphics card and the Archicad physics engine does not work. Would it be possible to have a fix in the next update? 

[Pato99]

Are there any options to modify the settings, can we add a hdri? 

[Funfun Yan]

Seems like we can only change the direction and height of the sun.

[ShineJoseph]

Ideally, we would expect some level of control over this option such as HDRI, Hue, and whatever makes it better. The current preview is not that convincing.

[Funfun Yan]

I once said in our community that I don't need physical based rendering , I just want the Arctic Render viewport mode in Rhino. Haha.

[Ernest Atanasiu]

big improvement over the 27 version. I would love some control over the Procedural Sky and Exposure, to reduce the bloom amount and color bleed from the sky. 

[Jim Allen]

This is quite cool when you initially use it, but there's one glaring problem - the global illumination is way too strong and the tonemapping is not realistic.

Everything in the scene has a blue tint that we just don't see in real life.

The problem with lots of renderers, is that the engine simulates physical properties not how people perceive the world.

Our brains are continually running a realtime post-processing operation on the visual information received.

It stitches together areas of vision and automatically regularises the lighting from the dark areas of a room which could be underexposed to a camera before the HDRI age, to the bright areas which cameras would overexpose.

So what we see is not how the world is really.

Blue skies seldom look as blue as photos make them.

For example this is a view from the PBR mode of my current model:

It's geolocated correctly.

That sky colour is not right. This is a photo of the site adjacent:

 

It's true that the photo is on a cloudy day, but look at the colour of the sky in the background.

Compare the sky colour intensity to a photo I took at Jungfraujoch in Switzerland a couple of weeks ago:

That sky is an intense blue that in reality looks a lot lighter.  Cameras capture reality differently, but it's not exactly the same as what we see.

This is one of the reasons professional photographers post-process everything. Sometimes it's to enhance the image to make it more evocative, other times it's to tone down the saturation to make it look more natural.

It looks like you are using a Hosek Wilkie daylight model (which is an enhancement of the Smits Preetham Shirley model) which I think is still the current state of the art, but the tonemapping is wrong.

We really need control over the tonemapping of the physical sky to make this feature more valuable/usable.

This is more noticeable internally:

This is not how we perceive shadows in reality. White walls in shadow when there is a blue sky outside do not look blue! Perhaps they do in the Mediterranean, but most of the world doesn't look like that.

The biggest problem is the colour bleeding of areas in shadow.  Even on the Visualisation page in your link you can see that the shaded side of the white house is a completely unrealistic blue colour.

The options in the sunlight box don't make enough of a difference. It's a welcome feature, but it's not really finished yet until there is modification to tonemapping for the background for the PBR render mode - preferably user configurable.

 

[Funfun Yan]

Yes, you are quite right!  And I think the physical rendering should have basic exposure and tonemapping tweaking feature.

[Illes Papp]

@Pato99 currently there are no settings yet as in its current phase the experimental Physically based rendering feature is not introduced to the 3D Styles yet.