Indoor lighting?
Fetito
Posts: 481
Hello!
I am already able to do good outdoor lighting, but my indoor skills suck.
Is there a good tutorial on this topics available? (Please no "Dreamlight" products!)
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Comments
If you can do Outdoor your able to do Indoor. Just remember for Indoor, Distant Lights are better for Ambient fill only and to use Spot lights and Point lights as your main lighting, set to the proper INTENSITY in the Light settings. Lighting is the hardest thing to learn in 3D. Also keep in mind 3D is fantasy, if you try to go for perfect REAL world type lighting indoors you will soon see you will need to cheat, add lights that would not be in the scene, to get better renders.
@Jaderail: Thank you!
What about GI for indoor lighting? Does this "resolve" everything with a click?
Are there presets for indoor lighting?
GI is not a ONE click solution. In 3D there is so no one thing works for every render. All I can really suggest is take a day to just PLAY with a indoor render. And don't worry over the figure or pose or props, just play with the lights. That was how I had my AH HA moment, and from the that worked I just kept trying new things. To this day I edit 99% of all my lights. Even the sets of lights that come with stuff. It's your render. If you get the LOOK your after, that is all that matters. Not how you did it.
@Jaderail: Thanks for your reply!
It's just that I experiment a lot and even with 16 GB RAM and an I7 my render times kill me. Especially when I experiment with animations and lights.
Yes, I agree. Good lighting, High render settings and Animation is very time consuming. I find that breaking my Animation files into each camera scene to be a big help. But nothing will really improve it more than a better PC.
Animation Tip: Think in TV and TV Movie format. Change Camera's often. Only render WHAT is needed in that shot, HIDE all else.
I don't know how helpful this would be for an animation pipeline, but for draft still renders I find a couple of things can help when I'm fiddling around with lighting. Actually, three things.
First, for draft renders, I hide all hair. I generally don't have a reason to take the drag that hair will put on a draft render with multiple light sources and/or GI (unless, of course, I'm checking for hair highlights :D) I even do this with hair that's been given the Uberhair optimizations for occlusion and shadowcasting.
Second, I enable progressive rendering. That lets me tell fairly quickly where the lighting is falling and how much of it there is, and I don't usually have to run a progressive render more than a couple of passes to know if I'm on the right track.
Or, third, crank the global shading rate up over 1.0...maybe between 3 and 6...depending on how much blur you're willing to live with for a draft. An alternate way to get the same general feedback as #2.
@dhtapp: you're my hero!
If you do any indoor lighting with shadows (maps or raytraced) on your lights it can really help to turn off the ability of casting a shadow on your ceilings and in some cases your walls when they are blocking lights that are lighting your scene. I find it far easier to render interior shots with LuxRender (out of Reality 2) because I can convert objects to lights and add additional lighting that an indoor photographer would use. The tradeoff as you are probably aware is 3Delight is a lot faster, even with a dozen lights, and all objects rendered in Lux cast a shadow like it or not.
For indoor 3Delight scenes I turn off shadows on ceilings, use UberEnvorinment 2 with the intensity set very low (10-32%) in conjunction with a 3point light system, Key, fill and back. I've heard it argued back and forth that 3 point lighting does or does not work with 3D, it works for me fine, but if I'm happy with the results in 3Delgight I'm usually more so when I do it in LuxRender.