I am modeling a locomotive cabview in 3DC, and want to
render it with POV, but I'm having a problem with the
render.

I get my lights set up with the scene the way I want, so
I'm getting the reflections, the shinning metal edges, ect.

But when I render the scene in POV, it comes out very
dull, there is no shinning metal edges, it's just kind of
flat and dark.

I have gone as far as putting 8-10 lights in the scene
to get things brightened up in POV, but then everything
is to washed out...

Is anyone else having these problems, or am I doing
something wrong here?

Thanks
Patrick

It probably would help to attach a picture.

Richard

Are your lights inside the cab? If not the light may not be getting in.

Richard

Yes, I put the lights inside the cab. I end up making things
so bright in 3DC, that I can't tell what I'm doing, but if I
don't, it comes out very dark in POV...

Patrick

Two things:

1) Re-crease your interior objects.

2) Check your materials. If they are considerably different than default settings for Ambient/Diffuse then that could be the cause.

Richard

Okay, a couple of things to ask, and also tell...  

I rebuilt the cabview, and did a couple of things.
The first cabview (previous screen shots) was not
centered on the x,y,z center line.

I rebuilt the cab, started with a freash scene, so everything
was set to default. I got my scene so it looked good to
my eye balls in 3DC. I ended up with:
3 directional lights, and
2 point lights.
Everything looked pretty good as a starter scene. So I
exported the scene to POV, and rendered. Now, the
scene in POV was just the opposite. It was so overly
bright, I couldn't make out what was what.

So, here's the info I found after some investigating the
.pov file. At the very end of the file, where I should have
my 5 light sources, there was over 70 different light
sources.

I deleted all but a few, and then my scene started to
look right. I played around awhile with deleting different
light sources untill I had something close to my 3DC
scene view.

Here's one question:
Is this a bug in 3DC?
If I have 5 light sources in 3DC, should'nt I also have 5
light sources in Pov-Ray?

I will ask my other questions in a different thread....

Thanks
Patrick

Light sources are not necessarily 1 to 1. If you used an area light you will get many lights in POVRay.

Richard

Okay, Thanks