Hello all,
tha subject has already been brought here previously (http://www.sweethome3d.com/support/forum/viewthread_thread,2266_lastpage,yes). The evidence presented elsewhere shows that SunFlow does a good job (e.g. here http://www.sweethome3d.com/support/forum/viewthread_thread,2200). Good looking it might be, from my point of view it requires all the advanced knowledge to actually force the engine to give results similar to the real life ones.
One of the things which annoy me most with the default renderer is the light handling. There is a small test - three colored cubes taken from the default library having shininess turned on, placed on a matt white cube inside an interior lightet with a morning sun. I would expect the shiny cubes to reflect some of the colored light onto the environment, and especially on the white box they lay on.
Here's the clickable output:
Default renderer, colored boxes with unchanged material:
Default renderer, colored boxes with shiny material:
Advanced photo renderer, silk setting, colored boxes with unchanged material:
Advanced photo renderer, silk setting, colored boxes with shiny material:
I would expect the boxes to reflect colored light onto the white underlying box. With the advanced photo creation (silk setting) there is some colored shading on the wall behind them, but otherwise the white box remains unchanged. Also, the advanced photo plugin does a much better job with the ambient light created based on actual interior layout. However, it still has a problem with the floor texture in the shaded area on the right of the rendered picture where is it drawn in plain colour.
So the question remains whether SunFlow is capable of this rather basic expectance or not. If so, then is it a matter of some settings I missed (which ones?). Otherwise I'm advocating for the extension of SH3D capabilities with another rendering engine (be it Yafaray, LuxRender, Cycles, etc.).
