HDRI lights for small rooms?

handel_035c4ce6

When I browse through the light packages in Daz shop I find countless HDRI light studios which offer great light effects but what if I need to render a small room without any light effects - just normally lighted room where the shaddows will come from the enviromental texture through the window?

Also will the light sources works when rendering if they are made invisible?

Richard Haseltine

I would not usually use an HDRI with a room, except possibly for exterior light if there were big/numerous windows.

JonnyRay

Typically for interior scenes, you're better off using something like the Iray Ghost Light Kit or Iray Ghost Light Kit 2 for light that is coming in through the windows. Or even just to improve your direct lighting within the room. The more that light has to bounce in Iray, the most you will struggle with noise in the render. You can use the HDRI for the backdrop, but as a main light source within a building it just doesn't work very well.

handel_035c4ce6

From what I see and read HDRI comes from the studio photography... only that the purpose of the studio photography is quite different from the lightning in 3D scenes... which means several years and the HDRI fashion will pass on.

Richard Haseltine

I'm not sure what you mean there - an HDR is an image that captures a full environment with enough precision that it can be used to light an object placed at its centre point as if the object was set in the original environment. Generally an HDR is less demanding on the render engine (and the application handling the scene) than a fully modelled environment. If you introduce a substantially modelled environement then the HDR is largely redundant, and may even conflict with the model (if you fit teh HDR in a room and it had a bright sky or even sun that would be blocked by the walls of the room). It's not a matter of one being right and en being wrong, it's a matter of the circumstances.

handel_035c4ce6

Richard Haseltine said:

I'm not sure what you mean there - an HDR is an image that captures a full environment with enough precision that it can be used to light an object placed at its centre point as if the object was set in the original environment.

I mean the studio photography is exactly about this - one or more objects in the center of the scene, while the 3D scenes rarely are just this (one on more objects tightly packed in the centre). The arrtistic effects in the studio photography often is achieved with skillfully positioned deep shaddows, while in 3D you build the scene to be visible, not to be hidden in the shaddows (why bother building parts of the scene which are not visible anyway?).

 

Edit: About the photography is not entirely my thoughts, a guy who made a light plugin for Blender explained exactly this - he looked for inspiration in the photograph studios. I tested the script for several days and while it was comfortable sparing the need to add and position lights on the scene when there was a single group of objects (or only one object) in the scene, I removed it at the end.

 

Sven Dullah

handel_035c4ce6 said:

When I browse through the light packages in Daz shop I find countless HDRI light studios which offer great light effects but what if I need to render a small room without any light effects - just normally lighted room where the shaddows will come from the enviromental texture through the window?

Also will the light sources works when rendering if they are made invisible?

HDRI lighting is just one of many ways to light your scene. You want natural light to shine through the window into your room? Well an outdoor HDRI does the job. Depending on the room it may or may not work well. IRay needs lot of direct light to render fast, that's why there are numerous light add ons to help with that. But you can also use emissive planes to simulate outdoor light coming through the window. And you generally don't want to use HDRIs for indoor lighting. It's much more realistic to use the topology of the room(light fixtures) or light props to do that using the emissive shader with or without additional fill lights. And nothing stops you from using the outdoor HDRI together with those emissives.

And there are the DS standard spots and distant lights, they are there to use for free, experiment!