Best lighting setup for simple walkthrough?

[Aaron2004]

Hello all,

 

I have the choice between VRAY free and Mental Ray....I will probably choose Mental Ray because I can animate a lot easier with that than VRAY free. Anyways, I don't need anything spectacular...no IES lights or even room lights for that matter. I just want something simliaer to ambient occlusion or the skylight but inside the house. Right now if I do a material override to Ambient Occlusion and put the camera inside of the house, It's completely dark (Makes sense). I can just use a light outside and have it come in the windows, but that way isn't completely perfect either.

 

Does anybody have any suggestions? It doesn't have to look that great...I just want some basic GI and maybe some simple materials for this project.

 

Thanks!

 

Aaron

[Justin Hunt]

Set the max distance to something that is relevant to the scale of the room. IE if the cieling is 2.4m high then the AO could be 1m of smaller if there are alot of small objects in the room.

 

Try to drop the AO into the Diffuse level of a Oren-Neylar Blinn or any shader that has a diffuse level slot. Then Just light the room with Fakeocity. Rendertimes will be a fraction of going the full GI route.

 

An other trick to avoid setting up a lighting rig is to drop the Ao into the self illumination slot and just have sun light for the major shadows/ illumination.

HTH

 

JHV

[Aaron2004]

Hey thanks...I'll give that a try!