I wanted to get into architecture a bit more lately, so I decided to recreate this room. I’m finished with modeling, so it is time for the lighting.
I find it a little hard to recognize where the light is actually coming from. I know it’s from above but it kinda seems as if it would be coming from all directions…
I messed around with some light emitting planes and the results were pretty good, except that the light wouldn’t come very far, so it looked like being emitted by a ceiling lamp. I also tried and used a sunlamp instead, but I can’t get some pretty results.
Maybe I should use area lamps instead? I am not very familiar with all these kinds of lamps.
Could anyone point me in the right direction to achieve a good lighting? Any help is veeerrryy appreciated!
Here’s the .blend file, for your interest: pasteall.org
I DLed your .blend. very nice and clean from what I can tell.
Now I’m not much into architecture, I do a lot of CG for commercials and TV shows, but if it were me…
It doesn’t look like you’ve done any of the textures yet? That is very important and should be done correctly before you do your final lighting. I would just put up a few emitter panels to start and then start with your textures, making sure you use the correct amounts of gloss/ reflections/ etc to get that lighting to really pop! You’ve got full global illumination turned on in your render settings. If you want to really take advantage of that feature, you need to first have something to reflect and second have materials and textures that will reflect and bounce light, if not it will never ever look just right.
Hope that at least gives you some direction.
I think light is strong sun that lie at left-up as you see forward, through that 3 not standard narrow windows, one you can clearly see at far wall behind ladder a bit below floor, other 3 are all above it. in article she say that “it was old ugly 3 floor house with lot of strange tiny windows, that was a challende to invent something that make it look good”. You can guess sun osition looking at middle window highlight and right wall.
I change gamma a lot in GIMP “Levels” to make more clear light positions.
Hi, storm is correct, cut a few holes in your roof and add sun, mesh emitter (camera back, door, downstairs).
This picture is rendered in Octane, not in Cycles.
It is easier to setup lights and materials for me but work with Cycles in the same way.
It looks like from storm_st’s image that your materials do not have much of a diffuse component, making sure you have a solid diffuse component for most surfaces is imperative for getting light to travel a realistic distance.
Also from the image (rendering something so I can’t look at the .blend file) it looks like you might be using the ‘glossy’ node by itself, the different shader nodes are designed as basic components which results in needing two or more to make a full material.
@MattyZ: Thanks. As this is the very first project I’m gonna finish (I’ve got a HUGE folder of unfinished .blends) I worked extra hard at the modeling part. As you mention the textures, here was my plan: first setup the basic lighting, then add materials and then refine the lighting. Problem is that I don’t even get the basic lighting done…
@storm_st: Originally I cutted these windows out and tried with a sunlamp set up as you mentioned (sun is at the left shining to the down-right). It only gave me the light spot on the right wall, so I added another sun lamp (bad idea?) which messed up everything.
@mib2berlin: I initially added mesh lights behind the camera and downstairs. I don’t know if it’s because I’m using Cycles, but you could clearly see the light. What I mean is, that it just looked as if I added 2 studio lamps in my scene… Not topic related, but could you tell me where you got the wall texture from. I was searching for wallpaper textures around the web but only found paid ones which drives me nuts.
Hi, for the mesh emitter i use multimaterials from the house.
I lit up the scene with gamma 1.25 in color management.
Gave up after 30 minutes, it is a lot of fiddeling with the settings.
There are a few tutorials about indoor setup with cycles, try this:
Yes, i think that strong secondary reflections are confusing, you need only one sun and bright sky, that left and right subtle hilights are from bright sky ()from same tiny windows, and you need 3+ bounces to get that effect, and you need lot of time to converge noise as probability to hit that tiny sun highlight after many (2+) bounces very small. Hard setup for any tracer.
It looks like from storm_st’s image that your materials do not have much of a diffuse componen
It is original photo crippled by me in GIMP to help understand where is light come, not render.
You should add soft light coming in through the doorway on the right. You can make it slightly blue so it simulates daylight coming from other parts of the house. Consider cutting a hole so sunlight lands out of frame at the foot of where the camera will be, this will add some life to the foreground as well.
