Oh, dear, the joys of a public development model…so sorry for the shit storm. Wasn’t quite the intent, but I did know the natives where restless from reading the tea leaves.
Necessary, IMO, fluidity of interactivity in rendered mode aside (stated ongoing development focal point, thanks) I thought of a simpler way to express my suggestion (for the last time ) with a common two word phrase expressing deeper implication. However, I’d like to first stress that I am not attempting to refer to any particular individual here, seriously.
Idiot Proof
I simpley think that ‘that other’ app ‘idiot proofs’ its default mode, and I perceived such as one part of its secret sauce…
I’m going to bypass the ‘fail safe’ ‘idiot’ baseline in a hurry, so what do I care!
In reading your clearly thoughtful posts, I can see that there are other valid thoughts on the matter, other considerations, other paths forward, and frankly, yours is not software for true idiots. Beginners, well I suppose that is debatable. I leave their fate to the marketing department…
Plastic and diffuse versions added. Note that i’m still using the studio HDR for skylighting because it’s balanced and doesn’t affect the color of diffuse objects.
It was a long time ago before kids but I recommend the trip up to Haleakala. I would opt for the sunrise next time though, driving down after sunset was a bit nerve racking.
Regarding environments without a lot of objects in them for reflections, here’s an old collection of artificial studio HDRI I had made. See if you think any of these would be nice to have in the v6 library too. ArtificialStudioHDRI.zip (3.0 MB)
What might be an excellent test is to upload an HDRI and a file with some objects and let different users test it with different render engines. So we can compare head on and maybe find better default settings for Cycles.
By the way Silver seems way to gray compared to stainless steel.
But this might have to do with the default HDRI used. It is way to little HDRI… Take a look at this:
Yes - but look at the “burn” on your stainless steel image. The trouble with adding more brightness is that it will really kill those lighter reflective objects.
It’s difficult to come up with something that works really well - or even OK - with lots of different models.
For situations with high energy spots (but also i.e. sun through a window on wall and a TV screen) having something like the filmic conversion would help a lot. Burn would be less of a problem (not gone, but essentially more balanced). In the long run it will be useful to use something like that to allow that kind of HDRis.
Hmmm, I see… Are there any other ways of introducing some sort of ‘imperfections’ to the metal materials that wouldn’t affect rendering times too much? Right now they look too smooth and ‘artificially’ polished (which reduces the realism) - some sort of micro bumps, perhaps?
Actually, I don’t think that this is going to be much of a problem. Quick test with the holomark mini set to a metal material, blocked and copied 4 times, renders as quickly with a 100% as a with a 68% polish.