Interior Lighting, Crits needed

[jeremybirn]

I think it's lacking in motivation and directionality. (I mean: I don't really get a sense of where all the light is coming from, and where it's going.) Before you start adding fill or bounce lights, make a render with only 1 light that shows where the primary light source is, and let that be your key light that controls the overall shading and shadow direction on the scene. Add fill and bounce lights that don't compete with the brightness of the key, so the key remains the most important light.

-jeremy

[Ian Jones]

I think a lot of the problem has to do with all the contrasting and rainbow like colour scheme and the myriad of texture work. Try to work to a pallete as at the moment IMHO its all over the place and messy. Not only does this make your scene look discordant, it also destroys the lighting by disrupting all the forms. So as a consequence a viewer will have quite a hard time figuring out exactly what they are looking at (I still can't work out what the scene really contains). Even if the objects are fairly abstract you still need to establish some clear forms so that you don't send your viewers into a visual spinout.

The textures as I mentioned are also extremely distracting. Too many heavily textured surfaces or too many different textures in the one scene just ends up looking messy. You can compare this to using too many fonts on a webpage. If you work on that and improve those factors then the lighting will be much easier to improve and play with further. You could also say that 'if everything were rough and bumpy, how would we know what rough and bumpy is?'. You see that there is nothing then to compare it against, so the heavily textured areas just cancel each other out. Any textural significance becomes irrelevant unless we have something to compare and balance it against. What you need to do is carefully balance some smooth areas, with textured ones. Dark against light, soft edges against hard edges etc... sorry if I sounded harsh, I was just trying to push a few points home. I hope that helps.

[woulfus]

Thank You Jeremy, Ian.

Jeremy: you are absolutely right about the lack of motivation, and the whole scene being too distracting with its dappled light all over the place, and no focus area.

I kept working on it at a stretch, and constantly looking at it didnt give me much indication of where it was going. After you brought out your points, it seemed obvious what it was lacking.


Ian: Thanks for pointing out the rainbow color scheme and the messiness, I couldnt agree with you more. When I looked at it fresh after a break, I saw how the disharmony of colors and the emphasis on every single object in the scene, it would be easy to get a viewer disoriented.

http://www.killeroctopus.com/images/3d/galleryimages/scene_cr_2.jpg

Here is a new correction to the previous image. I've muted the back ground and tried to have a central area of focus. But before I say further, Your feedback would be very valuable to me.

Thanks once again.

[Ian Jones]

It looks a bit dark but its defintely got more focus and a nicer pallete. Changing the circle tower thing in the center to a much more muted and rustic look has greatly improved the whole piece. The other colours are really well balanced now aswell. good work. I'm not sure if its just my monitor but it seems very dark overall...? Thats likely to be a gamma issue. Maybe someone else could tell you how it displays on their monitor for comparison.

Fantastic! I just loaded it in photoshop and changed the brightness to see if it may have just been my monitor. It looks great now... you really did take on board the comments and did a great job.

[woulfus]

Ian,

It was your good eye that helped that piece. Thanks for the comments.

Yes about the darkness issue. I work on my laptop, so it gives me conflicting hues, which makes it a tad harder to work on values and such. So what seems okay on My montior does tend to appear darker on the others. I should try to find a work around.

You've got some tasteful work up on your site. I'm very impressed. :)

[jeremybirn]

Glad you cleaned it up and simplified it. I hate to sound negative, but you should still work more on motivation and directionality. It almost seems as if there are light sources within the space we should see, the direction of the light leads me to think it could only be motivated by a visible source within the scene. Of course, if the light came from different directions, there would be no problem. But, not seeing any motivation, I'm left to wonder: Is the light all coming from inside the hole? From directly above the hole? Both, by some co-incidence? I can't tell. There are shadows of something that I can't see. I don't understand why there's a bright spot in the middle of the brick wall, as if it were behind a light bulb, but with no apparent source. I see a prominant "highlight" on the round metal (or dirty glass?) surface around the hole, but I don't know where it comes from. Perhaps it is a translucent material and the light from inside the hole is glowing through it, but I can't tell.

Once those issues are worked out, it also needs a little bit of fill light: once you have bright areas like that in a small space, the light would bounce around a bit, and other areas would get a little fill - you could tint the fill more blue to convey that it is a dark scene, but it needs to be there.

See if you can do all of this with fewer lights. One key light, then maybe one or two fills, and don't let the fills add up to more than 20% of the key light brightness.

-jeremy

[Ian Jones]

woulfus: Hey, glad I could help. Very satisfying seeing the development. About my website... tis about a year old, I really need to remake it and put new stuff. Thx for your comments.

Jeremy has some great points about the light directions... I guess thats the next step to work on.

[woulfus]

Jeremy,

Those were valuable points you made. Thanks. You did not sound negative at all. Your suggestions truly made a lot of sense, and pushed me to try further.

Here is another attempt. I've stared at it for too long now. So I will let it go for a bit. I did try pronouncing the motivational light sourse, however now that I look at it, I should have taken it further.

Please feel free to point out any flaws as u see it.

Thanks once again for your time.

http://www.killeroctopus.com/images/3d/galleryimages/vault_light.jpg

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