white walls grey

[Anonymous]

i have been trying to render an interior for days that has white walls. It seems as though it doesn't matter how many lights I add or remove, how many times I tweak the element attributes, etc. etc., I still come up with gray walls. What am I doing wrong?

[TomWaltz]

What are the material settings?

[Dwight]

First of all, THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS WHITE!!!!!!!!!!

White is at the upper end of the exposure range and when you try to make something white in a rendering, it rapidly becomes glared-out. OR turns ugly grey.

All "white" wall paints are tints of yellow or brown. Also, all wall paint has roughness imparted from the roller application. Graphisoft ignores roughness in the wall paint shader - It should be .01,.01,1,1. Adding this tiny amount of roughness makes cast light decay attractively and adds to the realism of the scene.

All the best renderers use a combination of yellow and blue tints in their lights to impart an overall whiteness to a scene. It's more interesting and believeable.

But if you don't like this approach - contained in my superb and priceless book and bleed-from-the-ears-by-four-o'clock all-day seminar - the solution is to substantially increase your ambient light level. For interiors you might like to consider a yellow tint ambient. Judiciously placed general lights can also be used to fill this grey ambiguous darkness.

[Link]

Dwight,

Have you noticed the bug with elevations that have their uncut surfaces filled with the material's own color (shaded) and the material is set to white(wash), then the element shows up as grey?

Do you think this bug may also have some effect on the amount of grey seen in the 3D window?

Cheers,
Link.

[Dwight]

I have seen the elevation greyness but never noticed in OpenGL since I aleays have plenty of color coding going on in those views.

But it never hurts to have plenty of ambient turned on to brighten walls at anytime.

Remember: THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS WHITE!!!!!!![

Get the T-shirt.

[__archiben]

Link wrote:
Have you noticed the bug with elevations that have their uncut surfaces filled with the material's own color (shaded) and the material is set to white(wash), then the element shows up as grey?

Do you think this bug may also have some effect on the amount of grey seen in the 3D window?

i do - if the sun incidence angle is too high (i.e. greater than 44º) the surface - whatever the colour - loses it's 'lightness' (lack of diffuse?). it can be brought right - kinda - in the rendering engines by increasing the materials roughness. doesn't help the 3D windows though. it must be a pretty hard bug to squash too - GS have provided a new type of surface in AC11's model viewpoints: 'Own Material Colour (Non-Shaded)' as a method of getting around that one . . .

Dwight wrote:
Remember: THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS WHITE!!!!!!![

Get the T-shirt.

hey mister dwight - take your t-shirt back to your wishy-washy washed out sky. try somewhere with a gaping hole in the atmosphere for a while - the walls are so white i gotta wear shades . . . (and there's black soffits too . . .)

ben

[Anonymous]

Dwight wrote:
Remember: THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS WHITE!!!!!!![

or is it : THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS DWIGHT!!!!!!![

[Anonymous]

you all crack me up with your white/no white debate;=) Yes the white is actually a tint of yellow, a nice 'pearly white' to be exact. I will try your settings and order your book Dwight....thanks for the subtle hint Link, I don't have AC11 yet but will remember the setting.

[Anonymous]

A tip of a day:
There is underestimated material setting called "Pipeline". When use carefully can be very helpful in getting white walls without crancking light up to the supernova bright value. Of course roughness is his friend.
Below are raw samples, no postwork.

[Dwight]

With the Emission Shader you make things glow in a color. Excellent!!!

Could you please post the material settings?