night lighting

[Da_elf]

need some advice here. i cant figure out how i should go about putting lights in those hall ways and rooms. should i just put vray lights to simulate overhead lights. or would simple omnis work and have self illuminated planes. Note. outside parking and foliage lights are not finished yet. oh and ignore the sky too i need to render out a sunset sky in terragen. unless someone has a nice one thats 360 degree that they can send me (sunset)

[UBIKmh]

Da_elf,

For interior lighting in a nighttime view I usually start with putting more or less random omni's inside the building. Omni's with a yellow/orange color and a far attenuation set to about 5 to 7 meters, a standard set shadow map will do for casting shadows (bias 0). Vray indirect will do the rest. The result should look like everybody has different lamps turned on. Leave some windows dark too. Then focus on the entrance of the building. You can use the same omni's but then with a bigger far attenuation. Maybe one Vray light to let some light come out of the entrance.

Marc

[Da_elf]

ok. here is a light theory/ram usage question since night lighting will be using lots of lights.

youm ention using the far attenuation. i know that usually once you set the far attenuation no light is calculated after that distance. thus saving on ram. i however just set it to inverse square falloff and then set the start distance. will it still be calculating info for the lights even after the inverse square equation comes back with 0 illumination in the calculation thus wasting ram with a whole lot of nothing. or will it just stop calculation on light after it reaches zero??

[CCS]

If you want all windows lit, I wonder how giving the interior walls self-illum would work....

Less lights and placement time. Not sure whether render time would be better or worse.

[plastic_]

self illumination works, so do multiplied output maps for windows refraction, but then you can't use light cache.

[percydaman]

another thing you can try is lighting the interior and then baking it into the mesh using renderto texture.

[UBIKmh]

Inverse square needs a lot of calculation time. As far as I know with an inverse square calculation the light intensity will not become 0. It will diminish to something that is damn close to 0, but will never reach that point. So it's probably cut off at a certain low number. The trick with the far attenuation is that your omni lights up a part of a wall and Vray indirect will bounce it from there. This way you get a very lively interior with all sorts of different lit areas. Looks much better then using self illumination on the interior mesh.

Marc