I'm not so great at lighting, and though I've experimented a lot, I'm not having much luck with what I'm trying to achieve here..
I have a cave, with a couple of twisting tunnels coming down to it from the surface, and want light to bounce around these tunnels and light up the inside of the cave, regardless of the lights actually having a direct line of sight to the inside of the cave.
So far I'm just getting the rims of the tunnels lighting up on the inside, and nothing else.
There is to be further lighting, from glowing objects, but I want this light spewing out of the tunnels to be quite obvious.
I want to have beams of light being visible, as they are through the dust in a crack in a curtain, without the cave really looking misty/foggy, and I was hoping somebody could give me an accurate, or atleast convincingly realistic way, to achieve this.
Keep in mind there will also be water falling down these tunnels, so a lot of caustics are going to be at play here.
This is the general layout of the cave, and also, there cave is not just a cross section as far as the lighting is concerned.. there is a back half to both the cave walls and the water, making a complete cave that should trap the light, being about twice the size of what's visible, just with the outer piece having Primary Visibility disabled.
However, I'm a total noob when it comes to photons & caustics, have barely ever touched them, only know the basics of what I'm doing with Final Gathering and Global Illumination, and don't know what Irradiance Particles or Importons even are..
If someone can give me the quick breakdown of what settings I should be looking into to achieve these kind of effects and the basic things to aim for & to avoid, I could find the right tutorials a lot easier, but nothing I search for seems to have much relevance for the kind of effects I'm going for other than the basics of refractive caustics which I more or less understand already.
I've tried pumping up the brightness on the spotlight to 5000.
But there's hardly even a few barely visible highlights inside the cave, splotched around as dots, not lighting up the interior, compared to the blinding brightness at the entrance to the hole.
I'm at a loss for how to have this light spread out around the cave lol =S
Thanks for your time, I really appreciate any advice you can give me! =)
Tony
