Lighting hallway

[euge04]

I'm learning lightwave and I was wondering if anyone had any tips for lighting a long hallway? My hallway actually is a big octagon shape too. To keep rendering time down I'm using spotlights everywhere. So far I've added all the practical lights and I started adding some fill but it doesn't look that great. Anyone have any tips for a newbie like me?

[Rei]

Ok, first turn on Anti Aliasing. Camera properties and down near the bottom.

[euge04]

I know about antialiasing. Its off so I can test rendering my lighting schemes faster. Any ideas about lighting though?

[starbase1]

I think you are likely to need long rendering times to get realistic lighting, but there are a few things you can do to start with.

I think you need to turn the ambient lighting way down - this almost never looks good. Maybe 2 or 3 percent if you must.

This leaves the problem that some areas will be very weakly lit, which is unrealistic.

For the next step, I suggest greatly increasing the angle of the spotlight. You can see the light from almost a full hemisphere, so widen the one angle accordingly, but with a very large soft edge, so it gets gradually less strong up the walls. Some fase with distance will simplify matters, I suggest a limit of about twice the floor-to-ceiling distance.

If this looks too faint, crank up the global lighting intensity.

Is the floor meant to be carpeted? If so, it will catch the light quite strongly, even at shallow angles of illumination. Increase the diffuse sharpness on the surface, (advanced tab), and maybe add a very fine bump. (Be aware the bump may require high levels of antialliasing to look smooth).

When you have got this stuff right, you may want to try turning on radiosity for the occasional overnight render!

Hope that helps,
Nick

[Elmar Moelzer]

Your pic is underexposed.
Make sure that the brightest parts in the scene show a bright white. Dont be affraid to overexpose parts of the image (parts can be so bright colors are washed out)
Increase the light- intenstities. You can even go above 100% so do it.
I am not sure if these are windows that I see in the BG, if so, there should be a very bright light coming from them (probably the brightest light), if it is not supposed to be night outside.
The lightsources themselves will usually appear to be very bright too (if they are not supposed to be in the focus).
If you want to get good realism add weightmaps to the model and use them to darken the corners and edges of the walls.
CU
Elmar

[euge04]

It is supposed to be night outside.

I tried turning on Radiosity but its taking an hour or so to render a single frame. I don't know if I can adjust it for less but I'm trying to avoid it by faking Radiosity as much as possible. I only have a dual 450mhz G4.

My ambient intensity is set to 0 right now. I'm also lighting the walls and ceiling with spotlights and a blue light coming from outside.

The floor is also supposed to be a reflective tile not a rug.

I also do not know what to texture the white walls with. I need to find some textures to experiment with.

[euge04]

Closer to the window

[Karmacop]

Well is inside meant to look like no lights are on, that everyone has gone home, or is it meant to be brightly lit and look like people are still there?

If it's meant to be dark I think it's looking good. Just make the outside light a bit brighter (as most your light will be coming from there) and I'd turn the ambient light up to maybe even 10%.

If you want it bright again, I'd turn the ambient light up to maybe 20% ... then stick a negative light outside to make it dark ... not the best solution if you can see outside alot, but it doesn't look like you can. Those big round lights would produce alot of diffuse light ... give them really soft shadow maps. Also, put those spotlights out of the hole in the roof.

[Gabe]

I'd use point lights instead of spotlights. Then just give them a fall off of 3 to 5 meters (the falloff will keep down the render times and give the lights a more localised effect) and crank their intensity up to 150 to 200 percent. That's what I did in the hall render that you can see here: http://www.sad-world.com/germany/set.htm .

[euge04]

So I tried spotlights from the top pointing down from the lights and vice versa. Then I put point lights in the middle in between the lights in the air. All of these lights I set without shadows. This is what I got. It took about 40 min to render on a dual 450mhz G4. Does this seem like a good amount of time? I would prefer a render of 20-30 but what can you do?

I'm trying to go for a look that shows the place at night but still open but with a dark moody look to it.

[Gabe]

Since your reflections are pretty simple, set the ray recurser limit (in the render options) to 2 or 3. This will greatly reduce your render times without having an impact on the quality of your image.

[Karmacop]

Ok, this is just a test. Is this more what you wanted? Maybe I made the lighst too soft ...

[euge04]

I think that looks great! Definately the kind of look I'm trying to get. Maybe a little bit brighter on the walls because I will be moving in close to the posters on the walls. How did you set this up and how long did it take to render?

Thanks for the example.

[Karmacop]

I've attached the objects and scene so you can have a look. But I'll explain the basic setup.

Each light has a spotlight. They have a falloff a bit bigger than the room . They have a cone angle of about 85 degrees (pointing down ofcourse). They have a soft edge of about 84 degrees. They have a slightly blured shadow map (the large cone angle makes the showmap sort of blured already). These lights aren't very bright .. maybe 10% I think .. 5% looks better but then you'd have even more trouble of seeing the posters. There's also a dark blue/purple ambient light of about 30%.

Anyway, I'm sure you'll see by looking at my files. I also just added some more lights (point lights near the ground) to add more light to the wall and I've included that scene. Anyway, tell us how it goes.

[oxyg3n]

That looks really good and renders in under 3 sec with low aa on my machine.

[euge04]

and it looked great even though i don't have the shader you used. I tried applying the same type of shadow maps and settings to my scene but for some reason when i turn on shadow maps for my lights pointing down everything goes dark. I don't know what I have set wrong.

[Karmacop]

Hmm .. I'm using 7.5c . The shader I used was just surface mixer (from 7.5c) and that was just to make the suface of the ceiling in the light halfway between the ceiling surface and the light surface. It just meant i could change the brightness of the light surface and didn't need to touch anything else.

Anyway, your lights ... Which version of Lightwave are you using? Does my scene render fine with shadow maps in your Lightwave? I seem to remember Lightwave had trouble with shadowmaps for spotlights with very wide angles. Either decrease the spotlight angle OR (if you can in your version) untick the 'fit spotlight cone' button and give the shadow map a smaller angle. I think about 60 degrees should work on Any version of Lightwave.

Ofcourse if my scene works and yours doesn't then maybe your spotlight is behind a surface. Remember spotlights don't care how transparent an object is it'll always make the shadows as if they aren't transparent. In your images it looks like there MAY be some kind of glass infront of your lights, so either get rid of this or move the light below it. If you don't want to do that make two spotlights: One behind the glass (with shadows turned off) so that it lights the room properly and one out from behind the glass (with specular and defuse turned off) to create proper shadows.

Sorry, a bit of a long answer but there's a few reasons this may not be working. I think it's because of the glass though.

[euge04]

Yeah my spotlight is behind the glass. I'm at work so I can't test it out now. It was driving me crazy all last night. I didn't think of that. I'm running LW 7.0 on OS X. Nice I can't wait to try it out.

I was also playing around with some fog. There is a nice shot of a hallway on these pages. I'm attaching it to this post. I really like the look. Maybe not as dark as this but something close. What's a good way of trying to approach this?

Also I want to thank you and everyone else for their advice. This is a lot of help. So far my schooling has been books and web boards.

I was also able to get my renders down to 18 min last night though which is very cool.

[Karmacop]

It looks like they are just using a volumetric point light .. I'm not too sure though. In your scene maybe just use some very light depth fog that is blue/purple in colour? Also, you might like to try some desaturation fog (you can find a plugin at flay I think) or maybe just turn the saturation down in the /processing tab.