Matching CG Lighting to a Real World Scene

I’d like to ask for a critique of my scene.


Goal
My goal is to learn how to composite CG elements into real world scenes. I will rarely, if ever, be able to go on-site to create HDR images to get the lighting perfect. I’ll have to work with the pictures I’m sent.

Inspiration

I love watching the behind the scenes footage of movies and quality VFX work. I like when i can’t tell if it’s CG or real.

Challenges
I picked a room which had several challenges to work with. The walls had curves, 4 windows (2 visible, 2 not) and the long wall had a slight warp to it. Blam (camera matching add-on) was invaluable. There was natural and artificial light to match.

Lighting
I easily did a few hundred renders over the course of a few weeks working on the scene. The hardest part was mixing interior and natural outdoor lighting so I went around my house taking pictures of lights at different times of the day to see how light bounced around. Switching to filmic blender helped eliminate the blown out lighting and provided more subtle shadows. I used Cycles for this project.

In the scene I kept overpowering the floor shadows or casting shadows from the table lamp instead of light (the light paths node was invaluable to learn how to use). In real estate, you always turn the lights on for a photo shoot.


Room design I tested two ways of creating this scene: 1) Enclosed room with windows cut out. I used Portal lights for the daylight. I tried archimesh/archipack (both were great) and then manually modeling the room. I could not figure out how to get enough light into the room so that it didn't drown out the interior lighting. Eventually I abandoned both and tried method #2.
  1. Doll-house cut away view
    Has an open ceiling and only the 2 walls you can see in the picture.
    This allowed me to get the right mix of daylight on a cloudy day, and also not drown out the interior lights, which cast a slightly yellow light. I used the Blackbody Node to get the color temperature.

Here is the wireframe and setup i ended up using




Setup

I did not model many of the items in this scene, as my goal is to do compositing, but I did the majority of the texturing myself. I learned that most of the models I purchased needed lots of improvements to be more realism.

Issues
I’m aware of the repeating wood pattern on a few of the the dresser drawers. I figured out how to take the same texture pack and create randomized imperfections , but it made the wood pattern repeat. I’m working on it.

I’d appreciate any insight you can provide to help me improve my work.
Thank you

1 Like

I recommend changing the glass shader on your windows and cranking up that hdr. The glass shader I typically use is as follows:

Mix a glass BSDF with a transparent shader. Get a light path node and set the Camera ray as the factor of the mix shader. Set the IOR of your glass to be 1.52. Keep in mind that the transparent shader has to go into the top socket of the mix shader.

This basically tells blender to make it look like glass from the camera view, but act transparent to light hitting it. This should help with lighting your scene.

Thank you for taking the time to review my work. I appreciate it.

I didn’t have any glass in front of the window, just an emitter. I’ve adjusted the scene and created the material you described. Is this this the correct node setup?


The light in the scene felt too “crisp” or something. I played with DOF but wasn’t happy with the results

thank you,
SB