I was recently working on making an architectural render at night. Then, I stumbled into a problem where if I added Lights to the inside of the house it would just make lots of noise and fireflies. I tried solving this by adding interior walls, but this didn’t solve much. I could never get the glow effect i wanted, and i can’t ring a tutorial on it. I am currently working on cycles and don’t have the time to learn blender internal. Any help will be appreciated.
I have no experience on this, so I may be completely wrong.
Photographers often help out the interior lighting by shooting (hidden from view) remote synched flashes into the walls. You may want to add big diffuse only planes of light to act as floor and ceiling bounces. For the actual lights they could be set as camera+transmissive (due glass) only, maybe also glossy (if used a lot).
Then add a soft glare glow to everything, with more concentrated and accurate version for emitter lights. I use material index for this (interiors only though). Remember, a photographers job is not to make the image realistic, but setup for the most beautiful image. Unlike photographers, we don’t have to wait for the blue hour
Heh… I can tell you from total(!) experience that real-world photographers much prefer to have absolute control over the illusion. They would, first of all, separate the exterior from the interior. They would shoot the building in daylight, first, with all lights off. Then, they would wait for absolute darkness to start shooting the interior. “Side-effects,” such as a gleam from the interior onto the wooden walkway or the gleam to the left of the (I suppose it is …) barbeque, would simply go by the wayside as being not worth fooling with.
using several lights i would advise using branched path tracing. i cant really help since i dont have any screenshots. a pic of what its supposed to look like isnt any good without a pic of what yours looks like.
try clamping indirect to 1.0 (reduces realism), disable caustics (significant reduction in realism), or fiddling with multiple importance (low impact on realism, if at all).
I clamped indirect to 1.0 and used used breached path tracing. This is the result. I rendered it to a 64:1 but i still need more help on this.
I realize furniture will help but this is not close to my final scene.
Found this tutorial about twilight exterior shooting. You can probably skip to E5 for his thinking about flash use.
Obviously nothing to do with Blender as such, but getting into the heads of real professionals are always valuable.
The lighting trick I mentioned is just using diffuse only area lights to mimic indirect lighting as it converges faster and you can get away with a lot less render time but takes time to setup. In tutorial he will use indirect flashes to balance the lighting from the different rooms, but shoots into opposite wall to obtain nice indirect lighting instead of directly on the wall that is seen through the window which would give harsh results. In Blender terms, that would be using a huge area light directly to mimic tiny flash indirectly.
For the interior lights, you may want to consider baking out the direct effects and setting the actual lights to be diffuse invisible. You could also render out the exterior lighting as a completely separate pass and add them together in post. Don’t forget we have a lot more flexibility in 3D than a photographer have.
Just wanted to update everyone on my project. I added large area lights that indirectly light the scene. I used render layers so this is just the house. I am about to add furniture but any more tips on the lighting would be appreciated.
Looks pretty ok to me as a start. Keep in mind the idea of faking bounced light from a flash is not to “light the scene” but to balance out rooms that have less light sources (and thus appear darker lit) than rooms with lots of lights. As an indirect light bounce helper, I would just use area lights in the ceiling.
I would increase exposure and maybe lower the world lighting a little to compensate. I would also add glow streaks to simulate the large depth of field/long exposure and glow fog. Did you consider using filmic? Iirc interior lights should be bulb wattage * efficiency, so i.e. 40W * 0.13 efficiency = 5.2 strength with appropriate blackbody color.
Perhaps tweak the results with blocked out geometry and reasonably close to real albedo values for the furniture (don’t use white everything even if that is more efficient at bounding lights). Testrender last with plenty of samples and a few bounces at very low image resolution.
I would seriously consider using compositing here. The interior of the building is really a completely separate rendering issue from the outside night. (And, the visual effect of “there are windows in the way” has nothing otherwise to do with the interior render.)
If you simplify the problem in this way, you now can deal with the problem in three distinct steps: (1) the interior; (2) the exterior; and (3) any reflection you want to see from the glass, and/or any attenuation or modification of the interior-render that is to be “caused by the glass.”
And if you want to peel-off the “lower staircase” and deal with that separately, feel free.
In doing the outside render, you will also add a few spotlights to mimic the effect of light from within the building falling upon the sand and upon the boardwalk. (In fact, you could composite that in, too … and there might be good reason to do just that, since you shouldn’t have to re-render the whole damned outside scene just to tweak a few light-falls.)
A properly-done composite is indistinguishable from a render that is done all at one time. Feel free, also, to use whatever rendering technology most suits the particular requirements of each component render.
[QUOTE] I would also add glow streaks to simulate the large depth of field/long exposure and glow fog./QUOTE]
I a a little confused with this because when i think of glow streaks I think of them coming from cars. For example
I thought glow steaks normally happen from moving objects not stationary ones. Any clarification on this topic would be nice.
Increased the exposure some more, I added some furniture. I added some more lights. I haven’t got to the compositing and I am still confused about the glow streaks on a still object. I am about to use filmic, but I just wanted to update everyone who is active in this discussion. I am wondering if compositing is all that is left to make the glow effect really pop and I am also wondering is i should turn up the AA samples to 128 to increase the resolution. Thanks for the help.
