Need help with interior lighting

[tica]

Picture this: living room, large windows on a terrace. Only sunlight from the outside. So I thought radiosity would simulate all that natural light illuminating this room, right?
Wrong.
Blotchy walls, dark ceilings and obscene rendering times.
Next try: fake the whole thing using area lights and all kinds of small lights that cast no shadows. Result: uneven lighting on the walls and ceiling, and a completely unnatural look over the whole picture.
What kills me is that I've seen it done easily by (argh) max users...
I am sure I am missing something here. And I'm sure lots of lightwavers have achieved perfect results in similar situations.
So here I am, after spending many days and sleepless nights reading manuals, books, and simply trying to twitch every single button in my LW package.
Beside the fact that I may be simply stupid, is there ANYTHING anyone can teach me in order to get the results I need?
I'm an interior designer living in the south of Portugal, so there is not even anyone I can simply ask for help around here.
Will you be so kind as to help me? Thanks a lot! :o

[cathuria]

Well, faking radiosity with area lights and point fills does work, although it takes a great deal more care, time, and sheer attention to detail than some might tolerate (me, in particular).

One problem many users have with radiosity on interiors is that they neglect to avoid light leakage; even though you're only picturing the interior, you still need exterior surfaces to block the exterior light.
And to get smooth lighting and even illumination with radiosity, you need a high number of rays and multiple bounces. As for the rendering time problem --- <ahem> FPrime. I'm afraid LW's native renderer is not practical for intensive radiosity renders unless you have a spare laptop that you can let churn for two weeks (which is what I did before FPrime).

[Jirapong]

I agree with Cathuria. Radiosity sounds great, but it is not one click and done. This is the common problem happening to young artists here at my work. Most of us, the old school guy, have skillful hand rendering background. So, we have the image, atmosphere, what it will FEEL like.(I use feel like not look like becasue ofcouse you can simulate lighting in computer graphic,but it will never be accurated.) Thus, we mostly use fake radiosity. It's faster and have more control for me.

[vpii]

Try going here, there is some great artists there that share there setups for radiosity. Or contact a guy on this board named octagon, he has the best lightwave interiors I have seen. Maybe he will help.

http://hdri.cgtechniques.com/~postspar/

[gaushell]

You can check out Overcaster by Eki - do a search here or at flay.com

He has a few options for ambient light replacement. One in particular is for interiors.

fprime is great too from Worley for stills - though can still take a while to bake.

G2 by Worley works great with traditional lighting methods as you can tweak lighting on a surface by surface basis.

[tica]

Hi all,

Thanks a lot for so many helpful replies! I will spend the next few days checking out all your suggestions. I'll come back to this thread to let you know what worked best for me, and even if I find something interesting that I think you might want to know... BTW, I'm not sooooooo new to architectural visualization (I'm 36 and been in this market for 14 years now...) but I've mainly done exteriors, and also some mocap and 3d effects for advertisement and stuff. But I really want to get back to my origins, which is interior decoration - getting old does weird things to people...
That's why I'm quite inexperient concerning interior lighting, and I was quite disappointed with those results I got with LW's radiosity feature.
Anyway, I'll check out all of your suggestions, and I'll let you know whether anything cool comes up!
Thanks a lot to every one of you! Really!

[nthused]

I must say, FPrime has really spoiled me with my lighting setup...doesn't speed up everything though as GI still takes too long - faking the radiosity effect is often the best you can hope for under must circumstances. Sure would be nice if the VRay standalone would support LW files.

Here's a test render (FPrime: MonteCarlo, 1 bounce, 26% ambient) that I let render while my son and I were at Cub Scouts - about 2.5 hours. It's still very grainy as you can see. Still a lot of tweeking to do.

What are you guys doing lately to help the look and efficiency of your renders? I'm always looking to speed the process up...

[nthused]

Test render with no interior lights - seeing effect of just "sunlight" streaming through the windows and doors.
FPrime render window, Monte Carlo 1 bounce, 1 exterior light(distant) 350% medium yellow, ambient at 30% with very light beige color.
14 passes

To get the look you're going for is going to take some work and time -

[gerardstrada]

Check this technique:

http://www.cgtalk.com/showthread.php?t=176195

seems that works quite well for interiors illumination :)



Gerardo

[PatrickLab]

Hi.

I must say that I had the same frustration as you regarding render time and render quality...i tried the different techniques available to make renders look good....my personnal observation is that putting one light outside as sun and hit "render" with radiosity on is definitely not sufficient, and faking radiosity with hundreds of point and spot lights across your scene will drive you crazy in no time.
My personnal technique is to use minimal radiosity settings as well as shadowless points to fake where needed....I dont know if this makes sense or not but this is the way i found that gets the job done for me. :rolleyes:
My advice is don't rely just on one way of doing things.....take the best out of several method and experiment.

sorry for my english.

cheers.

[PatrickLab]

this is my light setup for the scene in addition to one light outside for the sun. I have not any pretention to be a great LW artist but i learn a lot from others on the net and this is a way to contribute to the community. :rolleyes:

PS. experiment with falloff with the points and spots....otherwise they will blow your image away.

[mattclary]

Patrick, while I respect your skills to the utmost (they far exceed mine), I'm afraid I am going to have to find fault with your image. If you look at where the sunlight is hitting the floor, there should be far more contrast between the light and the shadow. nthused's last image is much closer to reality, though I think the number of bounces would need to be increased to get it closer to reality, as I think the back of the room would be more illuminated.

Both of you might want to consider using Bloom on your floors. Of course, I don't think that works with F-Prime, does it?

[PatrickLab]

I totally agree with you Matt. I know my image is far away from photorealistic and adding more bounces will definitely contribute to better image but will also increase render times to eternity :p .

Another annoying thing is that when you are asked to render a realistic stuff...there will be always someone to tell you that "wow, its nice ...but this area is too dark...we dont see enough details here....bring some light there...etc"

I dont know why but many people wants to see everything goin'on, and want the image to look realistic! Have you ever encounter this :confused:

[ingo]

.......I dont know why but many people wants to see everything goin'on, and want the image to look realistic! Have you ever encounter this :confused:

Just look at all the VRay renderings, they are the same. Looks mostly like someone turned ambient to high in those pictures. And of course the client wants to see everything in their pictures, they payed for it ;) So making some lightzones like you have done it is in my opinion the best way to make a good looking interior picture.

[nthused]

I agree - for now, with LW, you're either going to sacrifice by creating render times that your client cannot live with or you're going too have to play with other techniques that will not give you a "perfect" lighting solution - reality will push you to the latter conclusion.
Here's another go for my FBO.

[mattclary]

Another annoying thing is that when you are asked to render a realistic stuff...there will be always someone to tell you that "wow, its nice ...but this area is too dark...we dont see enough details here....bring some light there...etc"


Ahhhh... good point.

[nthused]

How true. We've (read "I") need to remember that for the most part our clients are using the render for sales - not to see how "real" it looks :-)
Though we can do both at times - we need to focus on serving the client instead of ourselves.

[ingo]

There is nothing like a "realistic" picture, what looks good in my eyes looks unreal in other people eyes and the opposite. Simply make it look good ;)