Interior Lighting Tips?

[Andrew W]

Interiors are particularly tricky to light well using traditional techniques but it can be done. Look at Andy and Sid's bedrooms in the Toy Story movies and Boo's bedroom in Monsters Inc. If you have the Monsters Inc. DVD there's even a fly through of Boo's room which is great reference.

Overall my suggestions would be to try and have a good keylight source, say moon light or a bulb in the room and take your fill cues from this. Placing fill lights isn't an exact science, it's a bit of a suck it and see exercise. Place your key, get it casting shadows and then see where you need to fill in some detail. You couls look at ambient occlusion if you have the time as this could be baked into the room (I'm presuming that the room doesn't deform).

A

[lazzhar]

Yes Boo's bedroom in Monsters would help a lot. There you could see that using fill lights tinded with a saturated blue will give a nice dark look where it still illuminate the scene.

[glytandrus]

Visit this link....
http://www.cgarchitect.com/resources/tutorials/smoke3d/default.asp

[jeremybirn]

The biggest thing to work on with your bounce lights is getting them to hit the center of the walls or ceiling, but not the corners. Whether you aim spotlights with soft falloffs and penumbras, or block the corners with volume lights emitting negative ambience, somehow there has to be that shading difference between the center and edge of the walls. Bounce light should bounce back towards the window with the moon first, because areas around windows that are light sources should always be fairly well lit, and then the other walls. If you post a render for comments I'm sure you'll get more feedback.

-jeremy

[stew]

Originally posted by jeremybirn
The biggest thing to work on with your bounce lights is getting them to hit the center of the walls or ceiling, but not the corners.
This can also be a problem with some GI methods. Things like C4D's "stochastic radiosity" or 3Delight's indirectdiffuse() (I would guess that PRMan acts similar) tend to brighten corners instead of darkening them.

[wellsae]

Thanks for the tips everyone, they are very helpful! I also found a very nice interior lighting chapter in the book Maya: Secrets of the Pros that I think will also help me a good deal.

When I get a lighting render that is making progress from my pathetic first attempts I will post it here. Right now everything is so... WRONG, and I need to think more about what I'm doing. :rolleyes:

Any other suggestions/tips are welcome.

Audrey

[Ergi]

Can you use area lights for bounces? That might be a quick and dirty solution.

Jeremy's is very good advice (avoiding the corners). Either keep them out of the spotlights (if youre using spots) with barndors, or you can place negative lights in the corners (hard to control), or what i end up doing most of the time : put a gradient in the diffuse or ambient of the actual wall material.

What can give you more control, for the main light source (lamp) is to use a group of spotlights instead of an omni. Constrain 4 spotlights to a locator, spread out at 90 degrees to each other. Now you can have slightly different colors for each.

Mind the contact shadows. You dont want floating couches and lamps.

Post a test render :)

cheers

[wellsae]

OK, I conjured up some time to work on this project. Here is the result of a few hours worth of messing with lights. There's obviously a lot of room for improvement (I don't consider this finished) but I don't think it's too bad for my first real attempt to do decent lighting. REMEMBER - I'm not really trying to create photorealism here - this is for a cartoony piece.

http://raider.muc.edu/~wellsae/maya/postings/lighting_test.jpg

I did a LOT of light linking. I'm not sure about some of the light types I chose. I used directional lights to give some general ambiance to the walls, floor, and ceiling, as a starting point. I used several spots and points as you can see from my outliner.

Oh, and I'm leaning towards daytime instead of nighttime now, which is why iit's blue outside the window.

This is only one corner of my room. Is it OK to have so many lights? I want to keep rendertimes as low as possible.

Any advice appreciated!
Thanks,
Audrey

PS: Just so there's no confusion - the chair, lamp, and table models are borrowed with permission from the Maya 4 Fundamentals book by Jim Lammers.

[wellsae]

Is my lighting render so bad that it warrants no comments or suggestions for improvement? :shrug:

[jeremybirn]

First, my comments above still apply, it would look much nicer if there were soft darkening towards the corners. Deleting all the directional lights and using spots on each wall would be a start.

Even if you aren't going for "Photorealistic" I think you could go a bit more for "Believable." Just as cartoon characters still need to show weight and balance, lighting in a stylized scene still needs to internally make sense in a roughly believable way. For example, if you saw a real scene like that, would the lamp light be twice as bright as the sunbeam? Would the chair cast a dark shadow sloping towards the window? Would the arm of the chair next to the window be black? If these questions are hard for you to answer while you work, get some good photo reference of a similar environment, and study how light would really move through that space - studying reference isn't cheating, it's actually a good work habit.

-jeremy

[Tex3D]

I agree with Jeremy. Occlusion lights (did I call that correctly?) are oft overlooked, but they really can make a difference.

Having that "light object" actually suck the light out of ares can really help you control weird light bounces and shadows from hell.

Even with a cartoony piece, it could still help.

Good Luck:thumbsup:

-Dave

[wellsae]

I worked on the room and I believe I have made considerable progress on the lighting. The corners are much softer and a little darker as Jeremy suggested. Changing my directional wall lights to spotlights and tweaking the falloff and intensity for a while makes the scene look better.

http://raider.muc.edu/~wellsae/maya/postings/lighting_test2.jpg

I also finally decided to go with dusk/night. The lamp is now the dominant light source, and I toned down the moonlight. I hope these changes make the scene look more believable as Jeremy critiqued.

Any other suggestions are welcome, and I thank you for your help so far! :thumbsup:

Edit: Yes, I know my proportions are off. That's my next step! :)

Audrey

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