Need help with lighting a room please!

Support Basics & Interface
1

I am trying to figure out how to light a room for an image that i am making and I’m having a very hard time getting decent lighting. I don’t think that three point lighting will work very well with this. if anyone can tell me how to light it then I would really appreciate it!

zachboy

blend file: http://hyperupload.com/download/edfa0359/childsplay.blend.html

2

I have always liked using radiosity for room lighting. I just collected all the meshes in your example – hence some textures will be wrong (more than 16). Normally you wouldn’t include the toys – just the walls and maybe the couch in the mesh collection.

http://members.shaw.ca/rjplus/cp.jpg

Hope this helps,
GreyBeard

3

Why not just use something like AO (blender or yafray) or GI (yafray only) to make it a little brighter… if you perfer point light, i would say… get yafray and use samples for all lights to create soft shadows.

4

Just add a nice AREA-lamp or two! They will illuminate any room very realisticly.

http://img368.imageshack.us/img368/4098/arealamp7pi.png

5

How to light anything is largely dependent on the intended mood. Is this room warm and cosy or cold and sterile? In real life, would it be lit by a single incandescent bulb, a few fluorescent lamps or an array of spotlights? It might even be lit by a small lamp with shade?

Work out what end result you’re after, then decide among the range of options which one or combination delivers the best result. Of course, shading options play their part too.

6

thanks all for your replies! My problem so far is that you cannot see the face on the clown I made. Its too dark. I had an area light at the top then I tried an area light from the side and that didn’t work. I used ambient occlusion energy set to 1.0 and bias to full. The clown’s face was always too dark. My first setup was a large area light at the ceiling and ambient occlusion. Please download the blend file at the first post to see what I mean.

thanks,
zach

Edit: oh yeah, Andy D, if you look at my thread “childs play (not the movie) wip” you will see that my scene has more of a sinister feel to it. Thanks for the tips :slight_smile:

7

Hey all I’ve decided to use the old game “simon says” to light the clown and other objects in my scene. I’m having a hard time getting it to look right. I tried to use radiosity with the simon says buttons emitting but it doesn’t work out very well. I’m still a little frustrated because I also used lights inside the buttons with ray transparency on but the problem is that no light hits the outside of the buttons so you only see light inside of them…

any ideas?

zach