Interior Lighting
csteell_c2893e4ab6
Posts: 484
Can anyone assist me with a lighting set up as a guide for the interior of a circus big top? I purchased a bigtop and numerous props that go with it but every lighting set up I have tried renders too dark!
Any help greatly appreciated. Cheers
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if the lights are where you want them.. but it's just too dark.. try ramping up the "wattage" .. on each lamp until it gets lighter?
Just so you know adding more lights to Iray speeds up render time unlike 3delight.
1 create cubes primative
2 use iray emmisive shader on cubes
3 turn opacity of cubes to .001
4 place cubes where you want them
5 render in Iray
glad to know the opacity trick.. I do use little light globes but was keeping them outside the scene....
on the other hand .. some times you just need to make lightbulbs...
In addition, set your units for light intensity to one of the 'per square unit" settings. Lumens get HUGE when you are dealing with a lamp that is meters away from what it's supposed to be illuminating. Lumens/m² or Lumens/cm² will reduce those numbers to something more manageable.
Also, try using a higher ISO film setting for the camera. I think it currently defaults to ISO 100 film, which isn't really designed for indoor use....it's more for non-moving outdoor shots. Try using ISO 400 or higher film settings.
Also on Tone Mapping, decrease the F-Stop from the default (8) to something smaller. Standard camera F-Stops are 1.0, 1.4, 2.0, 2.8, 4, 5.6, 8, 11, 16, 22. In normal indoor lighting, it's not uncommon to use something in the 1.4 - 2.8 range. In a true camera, we'd be worried about Depth of Field focusing, but since you're probably not using that on your camera, you're safe to use a lower number and get a brighter image because of it.
Don't forget to make use of light props in scene.. If there are overhead lights, make them emissive. Makes the lighting sort of natural. I pretty much use emissive surfaces like 95% of the time. I also usually mount a plane primitive behind my camera, and make it emissive, to take care of faces being too dark.
Oh and the cube's are resizable. so you can stretch them out and this increases the amount of light they produce. You can also play with creating colored effects to simulate night scenes.
Many thanks for your replies.Could I ask for a step by step illustration on how to add a Iray emmisive shaders to a cube? Where I get them from etc.I am new to lighting in DAZ Studio being a Poser user!
Any help will be appreciated. Cheers
For Interior Iray lights I recommend this vendor, I own most of his products. >> https://www.daz3d.com/kindredarts << His ghost light kits are the easiest way to light an interior if you don't understand how to do lights in Iray. For Iray emissive shaders https://www.daz3d.com/simple-emissive-light-shaders-for-iray. If you don't want to spend the money>> I believe Daz provides a simple Iray emissive shader for free. I would look at tutorials on how to use Daz studio on Youtube. I am away from my workstation right now. I believe the steps would be:
1 to setup your scene how you like it
2 go to top menu and create at least 3 cube primatives and scale them up
3 select the cube primative in both the scene tab and shader tab and apply Iray emissive shader.
4 In shader tab with cubes selected set opacity to .001 (so the cubes don't show up in render)
5 positon cubes so top, side, and face of subject is illuminated
6 render
I should warn you 3 emissive light is not going to be enough to light a subject well. So keep adding lights till Iray does not take forever to render or increase the size of emissve lights.
It seems DAZ provides everything you need for lights without having to purchase extras. I am thrilled with how much Daz actually provides for free in studio, now learning how to do all of it is another story.
I just want to bump this topic and want to add my 50 cents...
so if you place fake lights everwhere in your scene, its not going to be phsyically accurate. The problem with interior lighting and DAZ is that we have just sRGB color management which makes it impossible to get realistic interior lighting at all. I hope they add ACES in the near future, which is going to solve all of the problems:
first one is just the tubes in the ceiling ..
second one, did lay a shop light in the interior to make it easy for the cats to see the inside work.
But iray works like real lights and theater lights, and photograpy.. gotta love it.
Depends what you are going for. If you are going for how it looks to a camera, you are right. If you are going for how it would look to your eyes, it works fine. For example, I have one dim lamp with a shade in my room and my monitor. That is plenty of light for me to see in my room, but if I take a picture of it with my camera without a flash, you can't see much.
There are ways to do the "fake lighting" to speed up your renders but don't look so innaccurate. If you are putting a ghost light in front of a green wall, make it the same tint of green in the color channel so it's like the bounce light already. Tricks people that do indoor renders been doing since the dawn of time lol.