LIghting

[murambi]

im a complete noob when it comes to lighting so i decided im gonna stick to lighting projects till i become a bit decent at it
so i modelled a quick scene, its the second floor to a bank i have been modelling for the past two months, iwould like to know the best way to render such kind of scenes without using gi and fg as i here the y take tooooo long to render..
so here i go the scene has like 2 million poly's but im going to concentrate on lighting up the lounge first
here are the screen shots

[murambi]

another shot

[murambi]

the last image so can anyone give me any ideas on how i can start this out

[Gen]

*rubs temple* I see a lot of light linking in your future. I will say one thing though, add what you need only when you need it so if something doesn't look right a tleast you'll know where you went wrong.

[honestdom]

is this exported from google sketchup?

[bendingiscool]

If you want realistic lighting you really should look into FG and GI, although you can always fake the soft shadowing that these produce by using Ambient Occlusion.

Chris

[murambi]

GecT: out of curiosity im i still going to use the three point lighting system

hammer.Horror:nope archicad but i modelled most of the stuff in maya so its a mix of the two

bendingiscool: that takes too long considering the size of my scene

[murambi]

and out of curiosity how comes no one ever uses ambent lights as key lights and whats the difference between ambient light and point light

[Chirone]

ambient light is ambient light
point light is point light

ambient means environment, or is a word related to environment... something like that
so an ambient light is a light that affects EVERYTHING equally

point means.... point... in our case, it's a point in 3D space
at that point rays of light are shot out in EVERY direction and it acts as what you'd expect a real ray of light would do. so point lights can cast shadows


i wasn't aware that three point lighting would work in an indoor environment

at least not to create realistic lighting. indoors usually have artificial light sources or have windows where natural light sources can come through. which means you have way more lights to deal with than just two directionals and a point light...

i could be wrong though :p

[murambi]

so from your explanation all i need is too throw in an ambient light up in there turn on ray tracing in and it should do some magic

[DJbLAZER]

Ambient light in Maya is just some crappy hack I believe. However if you use a sky environment and enable GI, FG etc. etc. you can press render and wait for magic to happen... almost.

[gster123]

Theres no place for ambient lights in good CGI, they kill any sublties in the lighting and the detials.

[Chirone]

gster has it right
Originally posted by murambi
so from your explanation all i need is too throw in an ambient light up in there turn on ray tracing in and it should do some magic

sorry if i have mislead you there >.<

when i said ambient lights light everything equally i meant every surface receives the same amount of light.
there are no shadows added by an ambient light or bounce light or anything

[Gen]

Ambient lights flatten out the lighting, it was used in very low intensities as a fill light just so you won't have shadows blotting out areas. FG and GI were developed for a reason, they are not a cure all for every lighting situation but this is an interior shot so I can't see why not. Since you say your scene is so heavy, I say get some stand in geo and keep your MR settings very very low when you're testing and when you're done, render from the command line.

[murambi]

render from the command line
i have no idea how to do.

FG and GI were developed for a reason, they are not a cure all for every lighting situation but this is an interior shot so I can't see why not

check out my scene from most interior gi and fg tuts out there there is usually one opening into the room how can i do that with all my windows

[murambi]

threw in some color of what the final image sholud look like

[Chirone]

Originally posted by murambi
i have no idea how to do.

inside Benny's chess WIP is GecT's answer to command line rendering

since it was on page two of the WIP threads i found it for you :p
i should save this link myself.... (http://www.3dtotal.com/team/Tutorials_3/command_line_rendering/command01.asp)


what does your light rig look like?
looks like you have one point light in the middle there, and i'm gonna guess you have a few directional lights right?

When GecT said to use stand in geometry that's probably the best idea so far for your scene because, as you say, it's pretty heavy on the poly count.

stand in geometry is just substitution blocks coloured with the materials they substitute (i think)

use it to block out your lights, and you'll get your lights set up quicker and better

also i hope you're going to make your seats look a little more comfortable... the reflections make them look like they are hard... but i could be wrong, i've just never seen reflective seats before

[murambi]

its just one phong material thats why everything looks abit shiny
ok so trying this fg gi method and im already encountering problems first heres my lighting setup pliz tell me if its wrong

[murambi]

heres the image and im finding it to be way too bright at the windows is there anyway of reducing the brightness and increase the overall lighting of the scene

[Gen]

Originally posted by murambi
heres the image and im finding it to be way too bright at the windows is there anyway of reducing the brightness and increase the overall lighting of the scene

Yep. Tone mapping. Slap an exposure lens shader on the camera and make your adjustments. About the materials, I wouldn't suggest you do too much to them yet as it could cause your render times to take a hit, you can have some transparent objects for the sake of allowing light through but other than that, you can stick to lamberts.

[murambi]

gec t take me slowly i cant understand half of what you said when i said im a noob i ment a complete dummy when it comes to this
Tone mapping. Slap an exposure lens shader on the camera and make your adjustment

how do you do this

[Gen]

Under the camera's shape tab there's an MR section with a lens shader slot, there's also a subsection where you can just pile on the lens shaders, its up to you. The help files do a pretty decent job of explaining it, do a search for tone mapping. Also for the of sake test speed, you may want to hold off on the FG until you get the GI photons acting just righty, plus this is a pretty large image for a test, you may be setting yourself up for headaches.

[murambi]

been playing aound with tone mapping and i have realized it its up so much time this image took up 7hours

[murambi]

tweeked the lighting abit nuthin major

[Chirone]

that looks pretty cool. you can see the edges on the left wall though. are they hard?

[murambi]

yup havent smoothed anything i think it would put a strain on my machine that it just cant handle....

[Gen]

Originally posted by murambi
yup havent smoothed anything i think it would put a strain on my machine that it just cant handle....

This is why I had mentioned low res replacements for testing, I think it would've made life easier. As far as the lighting, I think the scene is a little over lit and that the light is coming from all over ( which I think is whats killing your shadows) plus it doesn't look like artificial lighting or natural light.