www.kraytracing.com

any tips or feed back welcome!

That's pretty good, but the lighting feels artificial. It's too evenly lit. Are you using a lot of light sources?

2 lights, 1 sun spot light 1KM outside the room and 1 area light on the ceiling.

You could try removing that light from the ceiling and play with tonemapping to compensate for the lack of light.

will do, is it always best to just use the Gamma setting?

I use exponential a lot, especially for interiors, but experiment. You could also save as hdr and then tonemap in some other software.

Easiest way to get to grips with Kray's tone mapping is to render out an image to HDR and then load it up as a background image and render just the image with various tone mapping options, so you won't have to wait as long.

update, with exponential tone mapping.

For some reason it doesn't look like exponential since you have a lot of burnt areas. What is the general setup?

1 sun spot light 1KM outside the room, sun sky plugin. The exponential setting seems to give a lot of contrast on a few scenes I am working on. Any thing I should be looking at?

Ok, I'll try giving some examples...

We have a scene, it has sunsky in textured environment set to CIE color system (personal preference, could be any one), a 220% intensity spotlight with sunspot with 1km inverse^2 falloff. We open kray pick the medium preset, check "spotlight to area" and hit render and we get this :
That's very dark.

So for starters we can bump up exposure to 2.0 and see what happens.
Not much better. It still is very dark plus the sky is completely burned and the floor has taken a yellow-ish color.

If we switch to exponential now and keep parameter 1 and exposure 2, we get this:
You see that it looks pretty much the same, only the burned areas are no longer burned, which you might like or might not, but it tends to give the images a calmer look and preserves more shading data in really bright areas.

For now we will switch back to gamma and lower exposure a bit, since the bright areas are a little too bright. With an exposure of 1.6 we get this
Now the bright areas are kind of ok, but the rest of the image is very dark, we need to fill it with more light.

We will keep exposure to 1.6 and change parameter to 1.6 as well.
I'd say that looks pretty balanced for now.

Let's do another small tweak, we bump gamma parameter a little more at 1.8 and lower exposure a tad to 1.5.
Well I'd say we're done with it for now. It looks good enough.

But for testing purposes, let's keep parameter and exposure values and switch to exponential and see what happens.
Hmm, that looks completely different, than the gamma version with same settings, while when we had a parameter of 1 previously it was pretty similar. Exponential works differently in general and it's actually most useful when we have a really bright light source.

Now here is a render with exponential parameter 4.2 and exposure 1.
That looks kind of like our gamma 1.6 exp 1.6 image and it has kind of duller colors in the bright areas (and more vibrant darks somewhat), which in arch viz is often a desired effect. So exponential can be useful but depending on the situation it can give strange results if we have gamma as our reference point.

Now that I've finished this I realize that the images are dark in general, and I didn't pick a good scene for testing (the camera is at a really dark corner) but I hope it serves its purpose and is kind of helpful. Also, the values that work here will not work on other scenes, you have to experiment. It depends a lot on the materials and lights you have.

Thanks! You are a star! Much appreciated.

Revised view.

Acidarrow, thanks a lot! That sort of explanation is brilliant, and helps us novices massively!