VRayLight, GI Skylight Multipliers

[tmccarter]

Hi, all. I'm working on an outdoor scene with a vraylight and GI. I've been following Chris Nichols' Exterior Lighting training DVD, which has been very educational (and I think all the Gnomom people are awesome) but I find myself hitting a wall. I start with no lighting in my scene, then I add GI (IRmap primary, medium preset + QMC secondary) with just the Max override skylight (just a color, no map) multiplier of 1. I render that, and it looks great. Then I add a vraylight in my scene (sphere, invisible, no decay, ignore light normals) with a multiplier of 1. And I place the light a good distance away from my objects. When I render that, everything's completely blown out and way too bright. What I end up doing is lowering the multipliers of the vraylight and the GI skylight down to about .5 or .75 each to get a balance. I've watched the DVD twice carefully now, and I can't figure out why this is different. Is my situation normal, or am I doing something wrong? Is it right have to take a light's mulitplier below 1? I've attached my scene, my settings, and a final render for reference. Thanks in advance!

 

-Tim

[ishpalsingh]

if u r using using linear mapping

reduce the multiplier of vray light

distance doesn't matter but the multiplier does

also checking ignore light normals mean throwing light all over the scene

uncheck it

[Christopher Nichols]

Yeah, you want to ignore distance by checking no decay, but keep in mind "size." In the DVD I make the size of the sun bigger for a hazy sky (or lower on to the horizon). Also, the size of the light effects the intensity unless you check "normalize" intensity. Meaning if you scene is not to the right scale, your intensity woudl be smaller or bigger depending.

[tmccarter]

Thanks for the posts, guys. So I guess this comes to another global question I've had: How "big" do I make the objects in my scene? How do you like to set it up? 1 unit = 1 inch and then build things to scale?

[Christopher Nichols]

Yeah... Max is set up for 1 unit = 1 inch. So make sure you are to scale and then adjust from there. This becomes more critical when lighting interiors or anyhting that requires a proper inverse square decay on the lights (not the sun).