night shot... help!

[rachel]

hello,

 

I have been asked to do a night shot with the following image. I havent got very much experience in night time shots and I would be very gratefull if you could give me tips has to how to achieve a great image... please!

 

thank you,

 

PS: at the moment I have a dome of lights for the lighting.

[pmanahan]

I don't have a lot of experiance doing night shots, I do a lot of trial and error work, but I would start with a bunch of subtle yellow/orange omnis inside the building, different intensities and slightly different colors of yellow/orange.

 

Can you put in some street lights? This will ad some more interest and I would make the outdoor lights white/blue.

 

I would also try to show off the penthouse, maybe stronger/brighter lights up there, furniture, pictures on the wall or hanging lights. If I were standing on the ground I would want to be up there, it is romantic to think about being in a penthouse at night. Maybe put a couple of people up there.

 

Last might be a blurred car going by with the red streaks of the tail lights, but don't over do it or it will be distracting.

 

Take it into photoshop and add a diffuse effect to give it a little glow.

 

Nice piece, you are going to do fine.

 

pmanahan

[Christopher Nichols]

Night shots are hard. There are sevral ways you can go. Based on your first steps which I see, I would say, go for a twilight look. Do this with e very low very dim very warm sunlight. Or better yet, if you are using a GI rendering. Use a twilight HDRI and no sunlight. Make it fairly dim.

 

Filling the space with omni's is a good way to go, as pmanahan stated. There are several ways to do this. The key is the falloff. I like to use a strong light with a strong decay (inverse-square). For inside use downlights (or spotlights) near the ceiling. To get the soft spread of light you cna do a small hotspot (2 to 5 degrees), and a wide falloff (90 to 150 degrees). This can sometimes work better then a omni when you light is near a ceiling and oyu don't want a hot ceiling. If you are using GI, the light will bounce around a lot.

 

Shadows are important. Light fromn the inside will cast shadows on the outside.

 

Watch out... long render times ahead.

[tcorbett]

While a few interior lights will help add to the realism, they won't showcase the building itself.

 

In addition to these lights, put some uplights on the building - gentle spots or webs that will wash up the walls from the bottom, and really display the features of the building. The sources of these lights can be hidden. Also include some brighter omnis or downlights at the entrance, and possibly along the sidewalk. And consider using a low twilight sky as your background.

 

Finally, adding a little glow on brighter light sources can help enhance the appearance, and hide a low-detail level.

 

Here are two stills from an animation I did for a project last year. Very last minute, so they aren't the best looking, but illustrate some of the principles here.

[Juan Altieri]

on nigth shots you need to start ligthing inside of the building, try to think that in the end you will see more the interiors than the exteriors, try to play with colors and decay in all the ligths, think that the exterior ligth needs to be so soft and not too much strong, and the interior ligths will keep all the atention, use washed blue, and yellow colours, try to use the END DECAY parameters to control the ligths, and remember this, you will need a lot of ligths to make a good job, so try to use shadow maps in the most of the cases (low rendering times and soft shadows), and rayrtace shadows in the cases you need the ligth trougth the glass to falls in the street (specialy in the first floor), if yo like to improve the qaulity use area ligths in some cases...

 

good luck

[leed]

Rachel

Night time images tend to take a lot longer to set up than others.

Do not start with the light dome, try starting with the internal lights, then spill from internal lights, street lights, up-lighters, spots and , then get a good night time, dusk sky and match the ambient external lighting to the colours in the sky.

I tent to use illuminated open ended boxes that represent the room space for more distant views as the one attached.

You can brake this up with wall pictures or silhouettes of people.

Ay night though you are going to need detail in the illuminated rooms, don't do to many fully illuminated though, perhaps try and put closed blinds in a few with light poking out through.

 

Make sure that every light you put in has a purpose. If you are not sure if a light is doing anything change its colour to red or green to find out what it is illuminating.

 

hope this helps.

 

Lee

[IC]

I really liked this shot(exhibited in the gallery here a while back.)

 

The exterior is just uniformly lit with all the emphasis going on the interior lighting.

[nisus]

Exterior: render (without interior lights) quite dark with no tricks...

Interior: Render a mask where all the glass is and paint your lights in photoshop... it's extremely fast! Just on the fly with NO rendering times!!!...

Blur a bit... Paint glass using the same mask... You'll have it done in less than one hour ,-)

 

rgds

 

nisus