Lighting environments

[NanoGator]

I'd first start by having a light come in from the window. You'll see it hit the floor, right? Put some spotlights pointing up on the floor, with appropriate falloff and soft shadow maps, to reflect some light on the cieling. Then, put s'more spotlights on the cieling pointing down, same trick, and make sure they're the right falloff etc.


That alone will probably be interesting...

[Finkster]

It looks like you put a lot of work into that model. Some good lighting and texturing could really look good.
When lighting a room like that, just imagine you are lighting a real room - turn on each light one by one until the lighting is comfortable.
First things first - make sure that lighting ambient intensity is 0. Start off with a totally black room. The room is being lit through the window on the left, right?
If it's a clear day try adding an area light approx the size of the sun (as you look at it) - pointing towards the window, a good distance outside it. Try changing the size of this light until you are happy with the sharpness of the shadows. Perhaps a few blue coloured distant lights can add to the feeling of a blue sky outdoors. If it's an overcast day maybe a large light grey coloured area light would look better.
Right now the sun is going to be hitting the floor or wall of the room, producing a very bright region, but the rest of the room will still be dark - that doesn't look right at all. We want to simulate the bouncing of this light to illuminate the rest of the room. Try placing an area light or two just above the surface where the sunlight strikes (you may need to remove the polygons of the surface closest to this light and place them on a new layer - then exclude the area light from lighting them). Try playing around with the falloff, intensity and colour until you get a natural looking effect. If area lights are too slow for your liking, you can do the same with an array of spotlights with very fuzzy shadows.
That should give you a good start, just keep adding these bounce lights around the room until you find a good look. A touch of ambient light may help, but I'd keep it no higher than 5%. Just be careful not to overlight the room - there should always be dark crevices and corners. That's what you are lacking now, everything looks very flat.
I would also recommend making a copy of all the objects, give them a different filename and give every surface a plain white texture. This can be good for quick testing.

Good luck!

[otacon]

Those are both two good crits. I'll wait and see what you do with those, but i just want to suggest interpolated radiosity as an option as well. You can keep the tolerance high( around 0.7) and rays per evaluation around 4*16....raise the settings as you get closer to final result. Make sure you know the scale of the model so you can put in a good enough value for the minimum evaluation spacing. Basically what interpolated will do is help fill out some areas that dont get any direct light. So lets say you put the area light outside as the sun...then maybe add an area light inside to lighten up the indoors. Do a test render, see what areas need lit up some more, add a point light here or there....keep the intensity around 10-20%. Key is to start out with a few lights, and work your way up. Also, you might want to model some of that next room, because that big black hole in the middle of the pic doesnt look right. Hope that helped some.

[delta wolph]

[offtopic]
Out of curiosity, is that the hobbit hole thing from LOTR?

[tonami]

Thank you for feedback nanogator, finkster and otacon.

I made one spot light with shadow map as my key light. I add one area light on floor facing up as my bounce light. One spot light from ceiling face down as a bounce light.

In window I put one spot facing the back door and one spot facing the front door (camera is looking through front door in render), I put one spot in the back door right corner of room and one spot in the front door right corner.

Only key light has shadow. All else no shadow.

The result is here.

I do not understand how to create soft light, I am trying to do nice well lighted room but right now looks very CG, not like a radiosity or soft light effect.

I could not turn on shadow on any of the other light as well, because when I do that the room become too dark. Right now if I increase the brightness of the lights coming from window, the window area becomes too bright, but the rest of the room is not bright enough.

If I put a light in the middle of the room to light the right side also is quite noticeable.

bottom of post for new render ^^

[otacon]

You definately need some more shadows. The area light should give you some soft shadows...also try turning on shading noise reduction. You said the room became too dark when you turned on shadows. So then you need to either increase the intensity of the lights inside, or add some more. Try messing with falloff to stop lights from lighting places that are already too bright. Also try scaling the area light to cover more area if you need to. The whole point of using area lights are because of their soft shadows, so you need to have it casting shadows. If you could post a render of just the main key light, and the area light on, then maybe we could see what areas need work.

[Mwai Kasamale]

turn off the lights and remember that lights have falloff, linear or otherwise. honestly I think you should start from scratch and do justice to your model.

Define which light is the Key,Fill and Rim on a object and scene basis.

Is there a fire in the fireplace, are the candles lit? Split your set into zones based on the falloff of the Keylight. Also watch your levels, you have alot of illegal(blown out) luminance levels
You may also want to try break up your model into ceiling/wals/floor if you haven't already.

On the shading side your colour to value ratio is tipped too much nin favour of colour, this however is as a result of the lighting, but different materials have different diffuse/ambient values. Watch out for those. I wouldn't recommend using Noise reduction unless you are only doing a shadow pass.NR affects bumpmaps too much to justify using it in combination with textured materials(Personal opinion). Don't be afraid to turn on the shadows for more than one light. In the real world objects do cast multiple shadows An remember your colour theory. Blue Light Orange tinted shadows, Orange Lights Blueish tinted shadows, how dark they are depends on the luminance of the object recieving the shadow and any fill lights in the scene..

Good luck, and great scene

[tonami]

I've attach my key light only render. The second render is when i insert two bounce light. One is on the floor casting up. This one has shadow turn off, if not, creates a lot of unnatural shadow facing upwards of all the objects. Is use to illuminate ceiling.

The second light is from the center ceiling cast down, is use to illuminate rest of room, has shadow turn on although causes some problem, makes the inside room look like has separate light because is brighter than the key light.

I remove all the rest of the lights, trying to proceed from here.

I have thought about whether fireplace should cast light, I want it to but only work on it after key light and room is properly lighted. Fireplace light should only be a little bit of glow.

bottom of post for new images ^^

[tonami]

I restarted lighting my hobbit hole for my son to live in.

1st image is key only light. I lowered the key to make it shine more into the room. I am not sure if this is a bad idea but it can be adjusted later. Key is spot with shadow map 2000 , fuzz of level 8. Fall off is inverse distance ^2.

Second image is one spot from floor, casting up, shadow map of 2000, fuzz of level 80. Is the bounce light from the floor.

Third image is a little bit of light on window frame to illuminate that area. Seems like it needs more.

Fourth image is the overcaster lights.
There are 3 spots, 1 aim at far side of room from the camera. The other aim at the side of the room close to camera.
These are shadow fuzziness of 30.
Third one is aim at the floor, fuzziness of 10.

5th image is adding more bounces around the window area.
1 point light is inserted to illuminate the walls around the window area. Objects have been turn off so that the crack on the wall is fix for the bounce light.

6th image is the fireplace as well as illuminator from the front and back of the room to brighten up the side of the chair closer to camera and the coffee table with two vases on it at the back.

(These image are meant to the be same picture, I just showing my work flow of how I arrived at number 6)

Wondering how to tweak further now. Please tell me if area looks unnaturally dark or unnaturally bright, or if shadow is needed or is excessive.

http://www.peopleweb.com/orphan/startover.jpg

[Finkster]

Starting to look very good there tonami! Just keep tweaking away until you are truly happy with it. You're definitely on the right track - it's starting to look very natural. I prefer the 5th image, without the fireplace lighting - it looks a little too powerful. In a bright room like this, the lighting from the fireplace would pobably be lost, yet we can see it lighting the ceiling. Personally, I would increase the overall brightness of the room, just a little, to give the scene a bit more of a soft natural look e.g. try to lighten the shadows on the ceiling directly above the fireplace etc.
But now that your lighting is looking so good, it shows us that the textures are probably now the weakest part of the scene. This could be a really great work if you painted some detailed textured surfaces. You've probably spent ages on it so far, I know it feels like there's always something more to do - I guess it depends how far you want to take it.

Keep it up!

[tonami]

I added some more light tweaks and started to model kitchen. I dont like the kitchen right now. I will raise the floor and tweak the model.

Scene is now almost 200 000 polygon before smoothing iterations are turn on. Almost every object has some smoothing. The render crashes a few times now.

I put my son in there too. He's finally home :)

How's it look?

[pnevai]

Create a HDRI of the room.

set global illumination of the room to around 60% or perhaps a bit more. Turn off your main light.

Place a mirrored ball in the center of the room and move the cmaera close to it so it almost fills the screen. Render out the ball only.

Use the rendered mirror ball image as a lightprobe (HDRI) image. Use radiosity to create the fill lighting for the room, using your other lights to get effects, like light streaming in through the window.

Adjust the intensity of the HDRI lightprobe until you get the effect you want. The HDRI lightprobe will go a long way in softening the interior shadows and give the room a more natural feel, as long as it is balanced with other lights in the room. Remember when you use the HDRI the room will get significantly brighter you you will have to adjust all of your other lighting to even things out.

Using this meathod will also dramatically increase render time but it is still the most accurate way to light a room.

[tonami]

Hi pnevai, I will try your HDRI suggestion soon. I started lighting over from scratch and have some new progress so show for. I hope it looks better now than from before.

http://www.peopleweb.com/orphan/steps2.jpg

[brap]

Tonami,
That's coming along nicely! Lighting interior environments without radiosity is definitely always a challenge. One thing I would suggest would be to do a full multi-bounce radiosity render (which will take forever) and then go back into your scene and start rebuilding your lighting setup using standards lights, attempting to match the radiosity render.
To get a little more photoreal however, I would start by trying nail the textures and surfacing as tight as you can. The parquet floor and the fireplace wood in particular seem to scaled much larger than they should be.

Keep up the good work!

[tonami]

I experimented with a radiosity light render. It took many tries to get it to look decent and I think it is still darker than I would be happy with. But too bright and the floor starts to burn white in the window area.

Forgive me, my site hosting has died, this image is on a... *urp* geocities site for now

www.geocities.com/orphanscall/radiosity.jpg


The original 3200 x 2400 took long long long long long long time to render. I dont know if I can try to reproduce this lighting using spots and area lights.

[otacon]

What kind of radiosity did you use? Monte carlo? You could try messing with interpolated and see how that looks. Also, why render at such a high res? Especially if its only a reference for your non gi light setup.

[tonami]

Hi otacon, is because I dont understand why the radiosity render has so much shading noise. Even at this post resolution you can see it on the walls and a little on the floor. Maybe its because the key is an area light? If not I'm not sure.

I'm using MonteCarlo with 2 bounces. It is supposed to look the best already so I did not try Interpolated since the MonteCarlo render has so much noise already. Your living room image... makes me feel like I should just stop now... looks like photograph while mine... well....

[tonami]

www.geocities.com/orphanscall/kid.jpg

12 area lights to try to recreate my radiosity render

www.geocities.com/orphanscall/radiosity.jpg

The program crash when above 720 x 480, refuse to save file so this is the biggest render I can post. :(

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