All White Interiors - Contrast Issues, Lighting, ETC.

[visualmusic.4]

Hi All,

 

The interior designers at work lately keep asking me to render interior spaces with all white walls, floors and ceilings. There is also furniture in the space which requires photorealistic glass and chrome and sometimes an object or two with real color. (The reason for all of the white is that they haven't decided on materials.) Anyway, the majority of the room is white, SO...

 

I am having the hardest time getting the renderings to look good. The contrast in the images always come out kind of dirty and the detail is looking washed out. Sometimes it looks a slightly better if there's a window in the room, but there's a lot of spaces that don't have any windows.

 

If I turn up the lighting the room loses more contrast and gets washed out or overblown. If I lower the lighting, the room looks more like grey than white. The designers want it white not grey, no color and keep asking for more contrast in the images. blah.

 

I'm rendering in linear space doing the gamma 2.2 thing. I'm using a standard camera, putting V-ray area lights at any openings and windows and then placing IES lights near walls and dark ares to add additional lighting and depth. If the overall space is still kind of dark I might use a really small value omni including only the ceiling to throw additional light from overhead.

 

Is this the right way to go? Am I missing something?? Any tricks or advice anyone can offer would be truly appreciated!

 

Thanks in advance,

 

Ed

[-MerlyN-]

Hi,

 

that seems to be a difficult job indeed... I think I would go with a HDR as environment reflection map, maybe also for global lighting, to give the image more depth. Can you post some previews of your scene. Might make it easier to give advice.

 

- Merl

[abmitalia]

''The designers want it white not grey, no color and keep asking for more contrast in the images. blah. ''

Strange - being designers they should be the first knowing that white is not the same white with different materials. Well saying that you can work with different AO color maps for ech furniture ore object ( instead of black - white use dark-brown or dark-blu etc --white ) use bump and displacement maps to get depth. HDRI as Nils said ---reflections - not as grey scale but very very slighly colored - where you can, use SSS material with different deep color maps. If you do it right and not too evident those '' designers '' wan't notice it but you gave depth to the '' nightmare'' ambient. RK

[deanomagino]

Try using the frame buffer and set an 's' curve in the correction control.

[Nic H]

post up some examples you are having trouble with?

[visualmusic.4]

post up some examples you are having trouble with?

 

Sorry for the delay...

 

Here are two most recent "white interior" views. I am struggling to get the contrast much sharper and the whites whiter...

 

Thanks again.

[heni30]

Instead of trying to conjure up what it should look like, look at photographs in

architectural, interior magazines to see what really happens in a white apartment

or museum and try to emulate that. To me these look too gray.

[Ricardo Eloy]

Imho, the problem is how you light your scene. The way I see, even if the materials had their "correct" colors, you'd still look at the images and not like them.

So, how do you get rid of that feeling? Well, you might start by defining where you light comes from, and balance contrast from there. For example, if you have windows, put lights there and have it bouncing through the room. You'll have darker areas, but they'll add to the overall look. This is an example of a scene I'm working on right now:

 

[ATTACH]37129[/ATTACH]

 

I'm using a VRaySun, VRayLight portals in every window/door and a PhysicalCam. A few incandescent spots to add some color (apart from the blue from the sky) and that's it.

The more lights you have scattered through a room, the more difficult to get volume from the objects. But, a couple lights in strategic places can add volume, color and make it look a lot better.

My 2 cents.

[erickdt]

You could make a VRay blend material with a standard white VRay Material as a base material and a white VRay Light Material as a coating material. Then you play with the blend amount to get the desired amount of pure whiteness.

 

E

[visualmusic.4]

Thanks for all of the feedback. I will/am experimenting with all of these options to find the best results for me. I never considered using slight color in my lighting setups since I've been trying to get pure white. I also like the blend material idea with the light material. Will give it a try...

 

Thanks again everyone.

[Dave Buchhofer]

Rick has the right idea, white is really a bit of a Chameleon color.. It can take quite a few tints and still read as white, as long as there are cues within the image as to WHY it is tinting that color in that area...

[v-tool]

u can increase values of ur light, use some aditional light to fill space, turn off reflection and specular of additionlal lights, render ambient occlusion pass and composite them in photoshop. U can aply curve to brighter up a bit and slightly S shaped curve to add some contrast. hope this will help