Iray lighting questions; better late than never.

StratDragon

I came into an older Mac Pro with ample CPU's, a heap of RAM, I popped in an SSD and installed Win 7. Now in all that time I've been a LuxRender holdout, but I think I've hit all I can do with it and further development in DS does not look like it's going to happen. I've decided to start trying Iray and I realize I can do this without a GPU a lot slower my first few attempts have gotten off to a rough start with lighting mostly. I've looked at some tutorials on line but it does appear depending on when they were posted some of the options have changed drastically or some of them are referencing things I have no idea where to find. Coming from a Lux background I may be going about lighting all wrong

in Lux it was throw three primitive planes in there, point them strategically around a figure (3 point) and bump the luminance up when I need more light in the scene. I had built a model of a room, ceiling, floor back wall, side wall. Added one primitive (~2 meters), parented a camera to it and pointed it. i set the environment to scene only because a dome light didn't appear to be doable, I had a ceiling - this assumes I know what any of this does in the first place.

and when I rendered light came from the direction that the normal(s) faced. So I added a second light, same thing, rendered, light came from the first light source, but not the second. 

One tutorial said I needed to change the wattage. I did not find that, another said shoot it with spotlights and convert them to mesh panes or circles, then it rendered like the inside of a cave that had been sealed off. 

So is my previous knowledge with LuxRender setting me back? Is there no relation when it comes to lighting? Should I be using mesh lights for indoors? Should I be using spot lights? Should I be making them a specific size? Should I be adjusting my environment? Can I adjust the environment as I render? I'm doing this all from CPU so the response is not great, and my runtime has not changed in the past 7 years outside of some stuff I've assembled in Blender and OBJ'ed into Studio.

Is there a recent tutorial on indoor lighting? Should I stick with 4.8 or is there an advantage to 4.10?

Lots of sentences ending with question marks so thanks for your patience if you read this and have a moment to help.

Richard Haseltine

Lights in Iray can have a shape assigned in the Parameters pane, or the camera pane. Emissive Surfaces can be set to be double-sided. You will need to adjust Tone mapping, since the default is set for a bright day outside.

StratDragon

Richard Haseltine said:

Lights in Iray can have a shape assigned in the Parameters pane, or the camera pane. Emissive Surfaces can be set to be double-sided. You will need to adjust Tone mapping, since the default is set for a bright day outside.

Thanks Richard! I'll look into that!