Need some tips on getting a 'natural' light for interiors

Herald of Fire

I'm far from being an expert on lighting, and while I've done countless interior scenes, the lighting has almost always been very basic and unrealistic. Luxus and Reality offer a nice diversion, giving me realistic lighting but sadly I currently lack the knowledge to do complex scenes without spending literally days rendering a single scene.

Now many of the workarounds I've seen in 3Delight use shadowless lights to achieve their results. The only issue I have with that is that many of the character skins use subsurface scattering which responds poorly to non-raytraced lighting. The 'lightbulb mouth' being the most noticeable of the problems.

Does anyone know of any good methods for giving a realistic sunlight-through-windows effect without resorting to external render engines or IDL cameras? The IDL camera solution supplied with Daz Studio seems to take ten times longer than the equivalent Poser render using IDL.

AndyS

Hi Herald,

for really "natural" lighting I don't know any alternative to IDL.
But what ever kind of ambient light you use, you have to keep in mind, that a light ray once shaded by an object never gets alive again. So for the real natural behaviour of light you have to turn the max trace distance to endless ( =0 ). Therefore "normal" ambient light without IDL is almost effectless.

But there is a way.
If you have a room with windows, you know that not only the direct sunlight enters the room. There's the diffuse daylight all around our buildings entering the room through the window(s). To imitate this diffuse daylight I placed an Uber Area Light Plane in each window to get the effect.

Now it needs some experiments to get the balance between this diffuse daylight of the windows and the sunlight for your like.

Andy

Herald of Fire

I'll experiment a little with that idea and see what I can come up with, thanks. I was sort of hoping for a range of different ideas I could try out, but I never seem to get many responses to my posts. Cest la vie.

Still, it's better than my idea of using multiple AoA ambient lights, though specular might be an issue since the uberlight surface ignores it entirely.

AndyS

Hi Herald,

attached you'll find an example of my light setup for The Bungalow.
The first is as described and with a simple ambient (occlusion with soft shadows) and max trace distance = 0.
But that one which really have that little special, is the second. It is the same, but this time IDL.

Andy