Getting that airy, light look for interiors

[khoross]

Oh you mean the burn value in the color mapping? never touched it actually...

Well there`s your problem.
try lowering the burn value as mentioned above. sometimes i find myself lowering it to 0.05. the result will be Flat render without much contrast,same as for LOG-C footage.but you get much more light in without having burned pixels.
i usually grade it afterward in Affinity or just use the VFB.

[MANUEL_MOUSIOL]

I'll try it out . Thank you!

[dean_dmoo]

If you take a look at his turbosquid site you will see the difference between his post vs raw render. That combined with a soft hdri and low burn value and then boosting the contrast/exposure/and a nice lut gets you a lot closer.

[Neilg]

Keep your burn value at .3 and increase the power of the lights way, way beyond what you normally do.

Get in the habit of typing in huge numbers and dialing it back from burnt out, instead of starting dark and creeping it up. That's the advice I give to new hires here and it seems to get them where they need to be quicker.
Almost every single person lights scenes too dark and i think it's because when increasing the power of lights, something that is brighter than the last render looks 'better' despite not being objectively bright overall, causing people to call it done and not push it much further.

really crank those numbers up - make your first render totally blown out and white. fuck that scene up.

[MANUEL_MOUSIOL]

fuck that scene up.

That cracked me up .Best advise ever!
thank you .I'll try that too!

[squintnic]

Keep your burn value at .3 and increase the power of the lights way, way beyond what you normally do.

Get in the habit of typing in huge numbers and dialing it back from burnt out, instead of starting dark and creeping it up. That's the advice I give to new hires here and it seems to get them where they need to be quicker.
Almost every single person lights scenes too dark and i think it's because when increasing the power of lights, something that is brighter than the last render looks 'better' despite not being objectively bright overall, causing people to call it done and not push it much further.

really crank those numbers up - make your first render totally blown out and white. fuck that scene up.

lol pretty much this
watch your white and black values as well. can also be useful to quickly look at the histogram of a ref image and compare to yours.
fuck that scene up agree.

[PGD]

I like it. I tried this much higher light values just last week too and liked the results.

Let's see your work so we can see how this is going.

[piotrus3333]

VRaySun/Sky, portals in windows, realistic intensity/temps for artificial lights, realistic albedos and the rest is tonemapping.
if Highlight Compression in VFB is not to your liking use Curves.
if you need unrealistically strong artificial lights - do it in post with VRayLightSelect.

[MANUEL_MOUSIOL]

Well, it's not like tonemapping is the key to everything. A good interior photographer lights his rooms if he has to. When does he has to? When daylight is not in favour. We can control that . But what about difficult rooms and furniture? What is favourable for good lighting when it comes to geometry?
sure, there are times when you have to model the room like it is and nothing can be done .
In my case I have more or less the freedom to take whatever room I want. So, are smaller rooms better, because light bounces more/closer? Are more windows better? Bigger ones? Higher or lower ceilings? I also have to consider the aesthetics and not just a bright room though...
I haven't tried it out enough to say....

[hoppergrass]

further to whats suggested, its more important to get well balanced mid-tone contrast/detail than just concentrating on the whites and blacks. Start with a rather neutral (flat) image then add the contrast rather than trying to take out heavy contrast which more often than not just ends up looking weird.

Second to that, there is nothing stopping you from adjusting the daylight values to something other than default. Use what ever will get you the results you are after.

[Neilg]

Well, it's not like tonemapping is the key to everything. A good interior photographer lights his rooms if he has to.

I don't know a single architectural photographer that doesnt shoot bracketed.... And in every situation with a 10bit raw photo, any other photographer would pull the highlights down a touch.
not to mention that every camera does it's own tonemapping before you see it. the only way to get close to an un-tonemapped photo is to shoot 7+ brackets and make a HDRI out of it.

The room doesnt matter - my general approach is still flood it with light then start pulling it back, dont 'add' light unless its a candle.

[MANUEL_MOUSIOL]

I don't know a single architectural photographer that doesnt shoot bracketed.... And in every situation with a 10bit raw photo, any other photographer would pull the highlights down a touch.
not to mention that every camera does it's own tonemapping before you see it. the only way to get close to an un-tonemapped photo is to shoot 7+ brackets and make a HDRI out of it.

The room doesnt matter - my general approach is still flood it with light then start pulling it back, dont 'add' light unless its a candle.

I wasn't meaning to say that there is a way around tonemapping . But the approach that the room doesn't matter sounds off to me as light would travel differently in every room. A cathedral will look differently and maybe not as "nice" as a small room with huge windows. Or the other way around. Know what I mean?

[piotrus3333]

I guess this is fairly close to how raw render should look in VFB (with VRay's defaults) before tonemapping:

[khoross]

I wasn't meaning to say that there is a way around tonemapping . But the approach that the room doesn't matter sounds off to me as light would travel differently in every room. A cathedral will look differently and maybe not as "nice" as a small room with huge windows. Or the other way around. Know what I mean?

sure the design of the room or Architectural space matter also the materials or color the walls and ceiling, just like in real life.
it would be hard in your case with the room you are working with grey wall & dark furniture to get the same result as the reference of Bertrand Benoit you mentioned early in the post.
also when you are shooting against the light isnt an easy shot and Braketing is used. or shoot in a cloudy day light .

[M.Max]

Okay So I've just finished the last render for that crazy project and I can finally join this discussion =D
I'm not yet as good as Bertrand of course (who really is ?! =D ) so I will talk about my own way of handling this type of projects and if anyone can suggest /correct what I'm saying please feel free to do so.
the images below are from an ongoing personal project that I'm working on in my free-time.it is using Corona renderer but that because I started it when I was on Vray 3.6 with slower IPR so Vray wasn't the best choice back then. in any case, the workflow is exactly the same in both.
1st image is the reference
2nd one is my WIP render after post-production
3rd one is the image that was saved from the frame buffer mainly with the famous photographic LUTs from Kim applied. you can find them here I will go back to this below.
4th one is the raw render without any tone mapping or any LUT (it is a bit darker than what I will usually use tho )
5th is the reflection pass for point 5 below.

So what are the main things to consider when working on this type of renders (my personal list )

1- use reference: to set your expectations to real-world colors- openings -design style can change everything so we don't compare apple to orange.

2-Tonemap the image: as others have mentioned before you will need to compress and manipulate the shadows/highlight in most of the time to get what you want
personally, in Vray, I will apply lower the burn value under color mapping ONLY for sampling and use None Mode for color mapping so I can play later with the frame buffer controls in an expected way (I think you will find my answer here interesting )

3- use LUT while working not at the end :
the LUT I've mentioned above is not just like an Instagram filter that we add to make the image looks photorealistic out of the box. you will need to build the image while seeing the final result so your color will look as expected.

4- color range:
I'm an artist so I don't really like to follow strict rules and I try to experiment all the time but in general, I keep my colors in a range between 10 to 180 and that mainly for 2 reasons :
A- the reflected light will be affected by this way more than what we expect.
B- applying LUT will change this value, so colors with very low value might look so dark afterward ...the white walls here are using 180 value here for example.

5-reflection :
If I have time to render and I need to push the quality further I will add reflection to everything (image 5 attached) ..in the real world almost everything is reflective and if you can't see it then it might be just because its glossiness is very low but the reflection is there or at least that what I like to see =)
I always say to my students " diffuse is darker than what you think and reflection is higher than what you see" and that's can make huge different
Combine the last 2 points you might go even lower in your diffuse if the surface is very reflective.

6- be creative with lights (softbox \ black blockers)
you can add extra lights to enhance the lighting only when necessary..you can render them on separate passes so you can mask/paint them later too if you like, but personally I like to render all the lights together with a bit lower intensity and push them later in post with mask (this might add some noise for dark areas so be careful )
in this scene there it extra softbox light on the right pointing toward the middle table and lighting the back of the sofa and another one outside the window on the left lighting the sofa ..in these case their effect is minimal like only 10 % and the 90% comes from the HDRI that's I'm using to light the scene .


Again all these points are based on my own workflow so you can take them as suggestions only and differently not rules =D
Just like 15 years ago when people used to work with 1.0 gamma workflow to create amazing renders it is might be possible for someone to break all these suggestions and get fantastic results!
Best regards,