What environment/lights should I use for an evenly lit interior setting?

tomodachi

I am very inexperienced with Daz and only recently found out about the different environments in environment mode. I want to render an indoor scene in a locker room with no windows. Because there is no "exterior" light source such as the sun, would I select "scene only" from the environment mode options? I tried rendering it before without changing it from the default "dome and scene", but I wanted to ask if this might have been a mistake? With this, could anybody tell me what kind of lighting I could use to light the entire scene evenly (if possible)? I thought a point light might work, but when I added it to my scene, I saw no difference when I previewed it in IRAY mode. Thanks!

Aabacus

Try setting the lume values for your lights from 1500 to something like 1.5 million.

Fishtales

Remember to turn off the camera headlight. It should get turned off when a Photometric light is added though.

JonnyRay

tomodachi said:

I am very inexperienced with Daz and only recently found out about the different environments in environment mode. I want to render an indoor scene in a locker room with no windows. Because there is no "exterior" light source such as the sun, would I select "scene only" from the environment mode options? I tried rendering it before without changing it from the default "dome and scene", but I wanted to ask if this might have been a mistake? With this, could anybody tell me what kind of lighting I could use to light the entire scene evenly (if possible)? I thought a point light might work, but when I added it to my scene, I saw no difference when I previewed it in IRAY mode. Thanks!

Point lights have a very rapid falloff. So you need to crank lumens WAY up to get them to cast enough light.

Now, the answer for what lights to use varies somewhat on your goal. In my case, my goal is usually to get an image that looks like I want it to look. So I don't care if my lighting is "real" or not as long as it looks plausible for the scene. One example is that sometimes with an interior scene I will create a 1-division plane, set the emissive color to white, and the cutout opacity to 0.000001% then size it to cover my whole ceiling. Adjust the lumens value and I have a soft light that shines over the whole interior. This is kind of like a psuedo ambient light that we used to use in other rendering engines. I don't make it too strong beause it will look odd by washing out shadows. I'll also add similar ghost lights to light a figure or detail of a scene if I find that I don't have enough light in a particular area. It isn't truly "real", but I find it easier than option 2.

The second way I've seen it done is to make all the lighting be "scene motivated". By this I mean that people will add lamp props and use emissive settings to make them cast light like you would in a real world room that felt too dark. While this is certainly going to end up with a more natural look overall, the tradeoff is that you have to allow Iray enough time to bounce light all around the room or else you'll have a lot of noise.

Option 3, if you have walls and/or a ceiling that isn't in your final render, you can make them invisible and then use whatever sun-sky or HDRI setting gives you the look that you're going for.

Final point is that the default exposure value in the Render Settings pane assumes that you're rendering an outdoor scene. It's not "cheating" to use the Exposure slider to adjust to get the right brightness for your image. However, Iray is more efficient at rendering when there is more direct light on the surfaces, so don't rely on this completely to make your scenes bright enough unless you're willing to wait a long time for Iray to bounce enough light around your scene to brighten it.

nonesuch00

If the interior has a ceiling & the geometry of the ceiling isn't visible then change the Surfaces for the ceiling to be emissive by changing the emissive color from black to white and change the unit measure from the default cd/m2 to kcd/m2. Maybe that will be much too bright but then you can lower the number from 1500 to 500 and try again and so on.

Richard Haseltine

JonnyRay said:

tomodachi said:

I am very inexperienced with Daz and only recently found out about the different environments in environment mode. I want to render an indoor scene in a locker room with no windows. Because there is no "exterior" light source such as the sun, would I select "scene only" from the environment mode options? I tried rendering it before without changing it from the default "dome and scene", but I wanted to ask if this might have been a mistake? With this, could anybody tell me what kind of lighting I could use to light the entire scene evenly (if possible)? I thought a point light might work, but when I added it to my scene, I saw no difference when I previewed it in IRAY mode. Thanks!

Point lights have a very rapid falloff. So you need to crank lumens WAY up to get them to cast enough light.

Point lights have inverse square law falloff, as they should. In 3delight Linear point lights give a non-physical, controllable fall off with distance - otherwse you can adjust the gamma or, for Iray, exposure settings.

JonnyRay said:

Now, the answer for what lights to use varies somewhat on your goal. In my case, my goal is usually to get an image that looks like I want it to look. So I don't care if my lighting is "real" or not as long as it looks plausible for the scene. One example is that sometimes with an interior scene I will create a 1-division plane, set the emissive color to white, and the cutout opacity to 0.000001% then size it to cover my whole ceiling. Adjust the lumens value and I have a soft light that shines over the whole interior. This is kind of like a psuedo ambient light that we used to use in other rendering engines. I don't make it too strong beause it will look odd by washing out shadows. I'll also add similar ghost lights to light a figure or detail of a scene if I find that I don't have enough light in a particular area. It isn't truly "real", but I find it easier than option 2.

The second way I've seen it done is to make all the lighting be "scene motivated". By this I mean that people will add lamp props and use emissive settings to make them cast light like you would in a real world room that felt too dark. While this is certainly going to end up with a more natural look overall, the tradeoff is that you have to allow Iray enough time to bounce light all around the room or else you'll have a lot of noise.

Option 3, if you have walls and/or a ceiling that isn't in your final render, you can make them invisible and then use whatever sun-sky or HDRI setting gives you the look that you're going for.

Final point is that the default exposure value in the Render Settings pane assumes that you're rendering an outdoor scene. It's not "cheating" to use the Exposure slider to adjust to get the right brightness for your image. However, Iray is more efficient at rendering when there is more direct light on the surfaces, so don't rely on this completely to make your scenes bright enough unless you're willing to wait a long time for Iray to bounce enough light around your scene to brighten it.

 

tomodachi

JonnyRay said:

tomodachi said:

I am very inexperienced with Daz and only recently found out about the different environments in environment mode. I want to render an indoor scene in a locker room with no windows. Because there is no "exterior" light source such as the sun, would I select "scene only" from the environment mode options? I tried rendering it before without changing it from the default "dome and scene", but I wanted to ask if this might have been a mistake? With this, could anybody tell me what kind of lighting I could use to light the entire scene evenly (if possible)? I thought a point light might work, but when I added it to my scene, I saw no difference when I previewed it in IRAY mode. Thanks!

Point lights have a very rapid falloff. So you need to crank lumens WAY up to get them to cast enough light.

Now, the answer for what lights to use varies somewhat on your goal. In my case, my goal is usually to get an image that looks like I want it to look. So I don't care if my lighting is "real" or not as long as it looks plausible for the scene. One example is that sometimes with an interior scene I will create a 1-division plane, set the emissive color to white, and the cutout opacity to 0.000001% then size it to cover my whole ceiling. Adjust the lumens value and I have a soft light that shines over the whole interior. This is kind of like a psuedo ambient light that we used to use in other rendering engines. I don't make it too strong beause it will look odd by washing out shadows. I'll also add similar ghost lights to light a figure or detail of a scene if I find that I don't have enough light in a particular area. It isn't truly "real", but I find it easier than option 2.

The second way I've seen it done is to make all the lighting be "scene motivated". By this I mean that people will add lamp props and use emissive settings to make them cast light like you would in a real world room that felt too dark. While this is certainly going to end up with a more natural look overall, the tradeoff is that you have to allow Iray enough time to bounce light all around the room or else you'll have a lot of noise.

Option 3, if you have walls and/or a ceiling that isn't in your final render, you can make them invisible and then use whatever sun-sky or HDRI setting gives you the look that you're going for.

Final point is that the default exposure value in the Render Settings pane assumes that you're rendering an outdoor scene. It's not "cheating" to use the Exposure slider to adjust to get the right brightness for your image. However, Iray is more efficient at rendering when there is more direct light on the surfaces, so don't rely on this completely to make your scenes bright enough unless you're willing to wait a long time for Iray to bounce enough light around your scene to brighten it.

Thank you for the suggestions! I will try the division plane one as it sounds like a really clever idea.

tomodachi

Fishtales said:

Remember to turn off the camera headlight. It should get turned off when a Photometric light is added though.

Thanks for the tip. I've seen in general people suggesting turning this off. I know that adding more light to a scene generally helps with rendering efficiency. Does this apply to the headlamp too?

 

tomodachi

nonesuch00 said:

If the interior has a ceiling & the geometry of the ceiling isn't visible then change the Surfaces for the ceiling to be emissive by changing the emissive color from black to white and change the unit measure from the default cd/m2 to kcd/m2. Maybe that will be much too bright but then you can lower the number from 1500 to 500 and try again and so on.

Thank you. Will doing this help with the render efficiency? I know adding more light improves render times, so would this also qualify as something like that?

JonnyRay

tomodachi said:

nonesuch00 said:

If the interior has a ceiling & the geometry of the ceiling isn't visible then change the Surfaces for the ceiling to be emissive by changing the emissive color from black to white and change the unit measure from the default cd/m2 to kcd/m2. Maybe that will be much too bright but then you can lower the number from 1500 to 500 and try again and so on.

Thank you. Will doing this help with the render efficiency? I know adding more light improves render times, so would this also qualify as something like that?

Basically anything you do to get more direct light onto a surface will help Iray render faster. As long as it isn't making your image look unnatural, any of these tips can be useful in the right situations.