Help! - Lighting A Corridor

[phix314]

Could you post the scene file? Understandable if you don't, but would help with this exact situation.

[freshNfunky]

first of all, it seems that you have a lot of noise in the picture.
did you used mental ray area lights?

well i am not a friend of entire lighting a scene only with scene lights and ommit
the final gather feature.

because artificial lights let the scene look always artificial.


... but you said it should be fast.

you can achieve better result in a acceptable time when:
-turning on final gather
- replacing all area lights by hi valued whitecards (=planes with a super-white shader with color value >1 )

setting the planes on primary visibilitz OFF
and enhance the light effect by driving the shader value by a circular ramp to soften the edges
can give the shading an additional enhancement.

[jeremybirn]

Point lights aren't slow, it's the soft raytraced shadows from them that are slow, and you don't really need those in that scene. Try placing a point light in the middle of each light fixture, with Quadratic Decay, and a bright enough intensity so that it really lights the area around it. 4 point lights per ceiling fixture would be even better. This won't take long to render at all, if you don't have them casting shadows.

A few spot lights can add bounce light coming back up from the floor and from the ends of the hall, to light the ceiling and other surfaces. They don't need Decay, but a soft penumbra and dropoff could help them blend with the environment so they don't produce visible circles of light.

Work on the lighting at the ends of the hallway separately, you could break-up the monotony by making it look like light was flooding in from some windows off to the side, lighting the foreground and the far end with a brighter cooler light. You might even put in a sunbeam in the foreground, that would be the only light that needs shadows, and make a bit of a gradient with more bounce light from the spotlights in the near part of the hallway, fading darker and greener with distance.

After you have the basic lighting down with point lights (and spot lights for the windows if you do that), then render an ambient occlusion pass. With samples at 64, and a max distance set to about half the height of the walls, you should get something that you can multiply over the fill light pass that gracefully makes-up for the lack of shadows and makes everything seem more solid and believable. None of this will take too long to render, it's all much faster than GI, FG, area light shadows, etc.

-jeremy

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