The best way light and render interior of a shopping mall?

[pradipta]

Hi,

 

I would like to know from you what is the best way to setup and render interior of a shopping mall? Since it has so many glass and steel element, hundreds of light fixtures and other glossy objects it may take months to render for an 4-5 minute animation.

 

What is the best solution for lighting for this kind of large scale project? And also my question ishow to reduce the rendering time and what type of lights and renderers to should used?

 

Thanks for any advice...

[FlytE]

what renderer are you using?

[Brian Smith]

Certainly the type of renderer you're using will determine specific settings, but as a general rule, if you're using hundreds of lights in a scene, try using self illuminated materials to simulate as many lights as you can rather than making your computer calculate the effects of every single light individually.

[STRAT]

depending on your renderer, i'd probably plump for a fake gi method. (if you're good at faking that is )

 

the render times will be a small fraction of those if using full gi.

[pradipta]

FlytE: I am using 3ds max for modeling, lighting and rendering. I have o probably use light tracer since vray will be too slow for this

 

Brian: yes, using selfilluminated object is a good idea. i will use that tor educe calculation time. Thanks a lot f or that...

 

Strat: yes, faking i have to use since i have time constraint. but, getting the proper gi effcte is hard sometimes for such a complicated scene. do we have some good materials/articles on net to look into?

[Brian Smith]

No, whatever you do don't use Light Tracer - it's way to slow. Just use VRay and exclude select objects from GI, such as high-poly models that really don't need it (like trees) and objects in the background.

[pradipta]

Brian, thanks a lot for your advice. i will start working on the light setup this week using vray.