IES Lights in Mental Ray

[Dave Buckley]

Does anyone have any best practices or tips for lighting a scene with a daylight system and IES lights, (for example, a night time interior). I can put IES files into my scene but everything is really dark. Even when i'm not using the daylight system.

 

My first test was a living room scene, with a series of IES lights in, logarithmic exposure and GI turned on in Mental Ray, Max 2008 by the way.

 

The scene appeared really dark and not very realistic.

 

My method for putting in the IES lights was to first create a series of target point lights and then change the distribution to WEB and then laod the ERCO file that i had downloaded.

 

Am i doing things right, or where am i going wrong???

 

If i want to be lighting an interior with IES lights then what methodology should i be following, because it would appear i'm misunderstanding a few things.

 

Thanks for any help (this is pretty urgent)

[Justin Hunt]

exposure control, exposure control,exposure control, its your friend, use it

 

as long as you have put in realistic values for the ies lights and the model is to a real world scale, then they work great. Use exposre control to brighten your scene rather than upping the lights values

 

 

Here I have a 3mX5m room. MRsun and Sky, portal light in the opening and a photometric light, All default values.

 

See the difference a bit of exposure control makes.

 

jhv

[SandmanNinja]

Hi Justin

 

Is that a Max 2008 option?

[Justin Hunt]

yes, but the theory is exactly the same for all renderers

 

JHV

[siliconbauhaus]

I find when using ies lights you need to crank up the mulitplier.

[Justin Hunt]

Then you wont be physically accurate. set the lights as they sould be in the real world and use exposure control.

 

I would highly recomend watching the mental bout max videos covering exposure control.

 

JHV

[Exellite]

halfway through the exposure control vid from mentalboutmax atm and yes, tis very informative

 

*cough*a little addendum for the new mrPhotographic Exposure Control in 2008 would go down a treat *cough*

[own1221]

I cranked up the exposure control which makes most of the scene look great, but the wall that is supposed to be red is now orange !!!