Best way to light interior floors?

[jophus14]

I was wonder if any of you can give me some suggestions. I'm looking to light about 40 floor of rooms, about a hundred rooms total. I don't want to add a VrayLight to each room with different values because it'll take forever to render. I played with planes with Standard materials applied and just changed their opacitys, but it looks bad. Any suggestions? I would like to create a scene at dusk or night fall. Thanks.

[Christopher Nichols]

I would say use objects as light sources. When I had to light a whole bunch of floors, I would have a ceiling with a illumination map using a VrayLight material on it. Works great.

[Boing]

What about putting a second non shadow casting direct target light in, tell it to ignore all but internal walls and floors and colour it yellow, if the light in the rest of the scene is low it should be a relativley cheap way to illuminate the interior.

[jophus14]

Christopher Nichols: I tried using planes with a VrayLight material of them. I made the values of the material range from 3.0-20.0 in the multiplier slot. It looked like a yellowish-white plane opposed to a light source. I know that sounds dumb because it is a plane and not a true light sourece, but it didn't have the effect that I'm looking for. Any other suggestions for this method?

 

Boing: Your suggestion would light the rooms equally though right? I want the light to be staggered about the floors.

 

I printed a suggestion about using a planar surface with a MaterialByElement modifier along with a Multi-SUb material, but it seems rather confusing to me.