Lighting help

[mdoyle]

Hey folks I am trying to get a close to realistic lighting scene for this room I am making but as you can see I am not gettin very far at the mo. Does anyone have any tips?? I have point lights with a lamps on the wall with a small fall off, an inversed fall off at the windows and a sun outside. There are spots from the mini spots on the ceiling and I am trying to get a light to work emitting from the white strip on the ceiling but unortunately I have tried quite a few different ways and nothing has qutie worked yet.

Any help or pointers would be greate

[Abigor]

well, just 1 thing i noticed looking at this. the point lights you have as you wall lamps are looking like theyr not emitted by the lamps themselves, but instead are positioned between the lamp and the wall. you might have done this so the light actualy hits the wall and isnt stopped when it hits the shade on the lamp. 1 thing u can try is to position those lights in the proper position, make the lamp shades seperate objects, and exclude them from those lights.

another thought... if this is such a bright scene with the key light coming from the window, would those lights even be on? and if so, would they be as noticeable compared to the brightness of the sun through the window?

wat you could try is having a hidden (unseen by camera) copy of the lampshades with a luminous surface. since your using GI, this will cast a softer light from those lamps that might look more natural for daytime lighting. i suggest a hidden copy of them because to get a decent amount of cast light from just the luminosity surface channel, you might have to crank it pretty high, and it might not look as realisitic. thats y you have your original, and u can surface it however you want.

about the long light along the ceiling.... have you tried a linear light? failing that, perhaps the above solution for the lamps would apply here too?

and for you sun light... you should probably use 1 large area light the size of the window facing straight in. this will give u the soft glow of the incoming light. then add another light, a spotlight or directional light, somewhere outside the window to give that hard window shaped highlight on the floor/wall. this highlight will also bounce light and add more reflected, soft light to your scene.

you might wanna try just experimenting with multiple lights over using GI. a good # of spots mixed with a few large area lights for softness can go a long way, and if you tweak them right, can probably save render time also. the only problem i find using area lights on indoor shots is that they're bi-directional. as far as i know there is no way to get them to emit only from 1 side, and sometimes this means you end lighting up something you didnt want, cause you only wanted light going in 1 direction. but if your not hurting for render time, Monte Carlo with 2 bounces usualy makes a big difference in realism over just 1 bounce. but unfortunatly, its usualy just a big game of tweaking and endless test renders. rendering with Limited Region is you friend and can let you render only wat your tweaking instead of the whole scene... check it out!

finaly, check out Otacon's work (if you havent already) at...

http://otacon.kvaalen.com/

... he does fantastic interior lighting. perhaps asking him some more specific questions about technique would be helpful.

hope this helps!

[DrTWT]

this post by polymess over at spinquad should do you well:

http://spinquad.com/forums/showthread.php?t=8388

good luck!

[mdoyle]

Thanks for the tips and the links guys. Will have a look at the tutorials and hopefully get what I am looking for :D

Cheers

M