Lighting Front Room Help

[Michael Pickard]

Hi there,

 

I'm creating an interior for a front room and am having trouble lighting it.

 

I'm using an HDRI to light to light the exterior and IES lights as well as vray sphere lights to light the interior.

 

I used sphere lights due to the IES lights not giving enough brightness to the room.

 

Ive attached the properties of the lights to this.

 

My question is how can i light it more evenly. As you can see from the render there are bright spots on the walls where the vray sphere lights are projecting onto it.

 

Would what your advice be to light better?

 

 

Thanks

 

Michael

[John Dollus]

 

I used sphere lights due to the IES lights not giving enough brightness to the room.

 

 

When you take a photo of a room, do you change out all of the light bulbs if it's too dark? No. Adjust your camera to the proper settings and you won't have to supplement. Of course, that's assuming you are using the correct photometry for the fixtures.

[Devin Johnston]

The bright spots on the walls are supposed to be there, that's the effect you want to see with a down light. If you want to get rid of it just angle the light target away from the wall, this will at least minimize it.

[Francisco Penaloza]

As a rule of thumb; if you are using IES lights, you assume their default value is physically correct.

Place all your IES lights, ( I would recommend to use VRay IES instead Max IES, the first one render faster)

 

Then place your camera and adjust the exposure as need it, for interiors usually a F-Stop or 4 or less, Shutter speed of 30 or less and ISO to 100 should work fine.

 

Then, place your Dome light with your HDRI, this has the less physical correct value, so there you need to adjust dome light intensity and exposure of to fit your scene.

[ahmeds]

As mentioned, the bright spots are meant to be there. 6000lm is quite powerful for a downlight intended for a residential interior, at least from what I've seen during my research. Look at lighting brands and see how strong their recessed lights are, They range from 400lm to 2000lm usually.

 

I'd lower the shutter speed as well, Learn Vray author Ciro Sannino recommends low shutter speeds for interior shots.

[Michael Pickard]

Thanks for the help so far.

 

So i took on your guys advance and adjusted the Ies lights aswell as the camera settings and removed the extra vray lights but now my scene is too dark.

 

If i adjust the HDRI to make the room brighter it over exposes parts of the windows and doors aswell as the hdri map.

 

If i increase the spotlights then its not a true representation of what strength they should be.

 

I've attached the new render to this as well as my HDRI settings, IES settings and camera settings.

 

 

Any advice would be great

 

Thanks

[mattcooper]

I'd move you f-stop even lower, I've gone as low as 1 before! Also try increasing the ISO.

Edited April 10, 2017 by mattcooper

[Francisco Penaloza]

Michael, here is where doing Arch Viz become more an art than a science. First what we need to understand is that VRay as many of the other Raytracer renderings work using Physical properties. The 'problem' you are facing is the natural result of Exposure on cameras, if you were a photographer you'll have exactly the same issue. read this

 

The natural lighting from the sun/sky is always stronger than any artificial light.

 

Stand up pop your phone look toward a window and take a photo. you'll get two options, or you see the outside and the interior is dark, or you see the interior and the outside is very bright.

 

One work around is increasing your IES lights and increasing your exposure(make it brighter) until the interior and exterior match.

Other option is placing 'extra lights' in your room to compensate the outside lighting.

 

The other way is using camera mapping or post processing, to tone down the very bright areas, this is how it works, increase your exposure until your image is bright, then the outside will be very blow out, apply Reinhardt colormapping and set it up to about 0.4 or less then render, you'll see that even tho the outside lighting is brighter, VRay will reduce the intensity to your maximum brightness value( burn value in Reinhardt)

 

You could do the same with Camera raw in Photoshop or the VRay render buffer Highlight Burn value. Of course this can go much far and you are limiting the dynamic range of your image, but some for some people this is not a problem.

 

Hope this help.

[John Dollus]

 

The natural lighting from the sun/sky is always stronger than any artificial light..

 

This is what the overwhelming majority of people doing renderings fail to understand. No light source will be as bright as the sun.

[Michael Pickard]

I've now finished with this project and with the timescale i had i'm quite happy with it.

 

I'm sure bits can be tweaked.

 

Thanks for all your guys help and advice.

 

It's much appreciated!

 

[mattcooper]

Great!

 

So, was it the f-stop, brighter lights, or a combination of both?

[Michael Pickard]

Was a bit of both, I increased the F stop a tiny bit and increased the brightness of the HDRI. I also adjusted the burn value of the reinhard colour mapping.

 

Then played around with brightness in post to get the desired look.

[mattcooper]

Nicely done!