Problems lighting "Studio Type Room" - Why so dark?

Chronopunk

Searched the forums, didn't find anything relating to this.

The product "Studio Type Room" has its own lights set up as emissive surfaces, all of which are fairly high in lumen count (many of them over 1mil), and in the promo images, the room lights up quite well.

However, every single time I try to render it - no tweaking, no fiddling, nothing, just straight out of the box - the scene comes out incredibly dark.

So dark, in fact, that I've been trying to up the luminosity on the surfaces (by rather a lot), to little effect.

I've been running this test render of just the room, no other props or figures, for about 2hrs now, and it's not finished, but as you can see from the attached screenshot, it's never going to be anywhere near as bright as the promo images. This is with default emissive surfaces and default cameras as included with the product.

Anyone else used this, and had this problem? What was your solution? This room looks like it should have great lighting, but... apparently no?

jag11

Try adjusting the Exposure Value under Render Settings, the bigger the Value the darker the image.

Chronopunk

Hm. Could be.

The exposure settings are at 13 (default), but I'll give it a shot.

murgatroyd314

Chronopunk said:

Hm. Could be.

The exposure settings are at 13 (default), but I'll give it a shot.

Default settings are suitable for outdoor scenes in full sunlight. They'll tend to give an underexposed effect with realistic indoor light levels.

Chronopunk

That seems to have been the issue, more or less, thanks all!

Now to twiddle with it until the floor doesn't come out looking like it's grossly overexposed. I can get the model's skin tones looking great, but the white surfaces in the apartment are positively glowing. I might dial down their surface settings or whatnot.

maclean

You can find a guide to EV (Exposure Value) here

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exposure_value#Tabulated_exposure_values