Hi everyone, this is my first post on this forum after being a long time lurker, and I have a question for you guys.
I have a shot that I’m trying to make look realistic that entirely relies on interior lighting and I’m really struggling and am on a time crunch as well.
The shot doesn’t look even close to real and I know it, even though it’s using mostly photoscanned objects/pbr materials. I’ll upload a pic of the shot.
What can I do to make this look better?
Problems with lighting depend on the situation of the scene.
You can do it like a real light, or you can do it for a movie-like production.
This may be difficult to adjust in a short time.
However, Color Management adjustments can also change the mood of the scene.
Try AGX or Filmic
※ HDRI can also be added if the scene is affected by an external light source.
the thing with the color management side is I can’t really do a whole lot to modify that because I’m working with ACES
The light from the big fires looks weird to me, like the light sources aren’t actually coming from the flames. I would expect the light to affect objects all around, but it looks like the light is only visible on the floor in front of the fire?
Or is the ground shiny and I am seeing reflections from the flames? If that is the case, I would increase the roughness of the floor a lot, I wouldn’t expect shiny varnished floors in a medieval building, they would be rather rough and dusty.
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The floor planks seem a bit too big to me. It’s throwing off the scale of the scene.
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The depth of field is too intense. You would usually get it this strong only in a macro photograph, like if you were to take a photo of an insect. It makes the scene look miniature.
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I can tell the 2 fires are identical, but mirrored.
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I think what your render is lacking isn’t so much volumetric fog, at least not as much as you added in the second render. It’s bloom or glare you seek. It would make the fires look much nicer. The volume is kinda giving you the effect, but you could get it better and more controlled with the compositor’s glare node. Keep it subtle, it’s easy to overdo glare.
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The lighting isn’t placed in a way that makes the scene look good. Everything is equally lit, with no focus on anything in particular. Also, your whole image is dim, which just makes it hard to see. If you want to make a good dark image, it’s all about contrast. Could you place the lighting to make the character more visible?
A dark scene isn’t about making everything dark, that will just make the subject hard to see.
having brighter zones where you want the viewer to look can be useful and can contribute to the feel of a scene. As long as there still are dark areas, the image will still feel dark overall, even with some brighter points of interest.
Yeah, it’s just too shiny, I was considering changing that
Guess I’ll have to give up on cheating with that, lol
Yeah, that issue I was aware of already, realized after I offset one of the animations but forgot to duplicate the material.
That’s a great idea
Yeah, you’re right about that… you made a whole test shot just for me?? Thanks a lot, lol - the visualization helps quite a bit.
Yeah, lighting the character right will be kind of tough because it’s a video projected onto kind of a shoddy model but I guess it must be done.
Computer is starting to show it’s age too so any update I make I have to wait like 15 seconds to see, lol
I’ll post whatever progress I make
Might also be for other reasons. You say you are using photoscans. Is the polygon count of the scene huge? If the scans are really heavy, you can probably decimate them quite a bit with no visual difference.
Are there objects with modifiers? Those are often the problem if you have slow updates. Modifiers have to be updated every frame or when something changes. Disable them in the viewport or apply them.
Are there smoke simulations or particle systems? Same as modifiers, they take time to update, disable their viewport visibility.
There are larger poly counts but I decimated most of them. no simulations, no modifiers that are impacting much.
I’m trying to keep the scene as low intensity as possible, but my computer is a 2017 iMac with exclusively cpu rendering, so it’s only to be expected at this point.
I’d been putting off investing in a newer pc but now that the rubber is starting to meet the road with 4k editing and stuff, I’m realizing I’m going to have to jump ship sooner rather than later…
If it’s mainly 4K textures causing slow-down, use lower res ones while working on lighting composition. You can switch back when you get a look you like to see what the overall effect would be. When you do, prioritise the areas the light actually highlights. Some things that remain more shadowed might not see much benefit from the higher res textures.
If that doesn’t make the viewport fast enough, another suggestion would be switching out some of the higher poly models in the viewport with much lower poly proxies, following the same principle as above. Just make sure they are hidden from the render. Possibly a bit of a faff to set up initially, but if it can speed iterating over the scene it might save time overall. Most elements look like fairly simple shapes to begin with and shouldn’t require much geometry to give the basic effect.