RPC Environment Lighting Tips for Mental Ray
The RPC Environment completely eliminates the hassles associated with creating a dome and texture mapping
The Customer Service Team has received several questions from users trying to use the RPC Environment in Mental Ray. The RPC Environment is 100% compatible with Mental Ray, as are all RPCs, however it is necessary to configure lighting to get beautiful results like those which users are accustom to with the Scanline Renderer.
When working with the RPC Environment, the following variables affect render appearance:
- Lighting Settings
- Types of Lights Used
- Environmental Settings
- RPC Self Illumination Values
Rendering #1
A scene using the Environment rendered with the Scanline Renderer.
Rendering #2
A scene using the Environment rendered with the Mental Ray Renderer.
Lighting Scenarios
When using the Scanline renderer, if you place an RPC Environment and render it with a daylight system, it will look like this.
This is the position of the light source:
Using the same scene, switch to Mental Ray instead of Scanline as the renderer. The results will be something like this:
The daylight system has completely blown everything out in Mental Ray.
Delete the Daylight System and view what happens. Looks much better, but the sky is gone and Marcus’s texture looks very poorly saturated.
Toggle on Linear for the Exposure Control and now Marcus has a much better level of saturation. He is still a little dark, but this will be resolved once we add lights to the scene.
Target Directs are always a good choice. I placed one pointing down to the ground plane and one pointing up from the ground to light the sky. It looks like this:
Be sure and exclude all items except the RPC Environment from the upward facing light to avoid extra light and shadows being added to the scene.
Now that the light was pointing to the sky, the sky’s texture is revealed. The light pointing down further illuminated Marcus.
Lighting Recommendation
This tutorial was created to show users that while textures do render differently when switching from Scanline rendering to Mental Ray rendering, it is still possible to get very comparable results by tweaking scene settings.
Test out different lighting settings and see what works best for you.
Need help? Please e-mail support@archvision.com.
