How to light this scene?

[hardrock_ram]

I am fairly new at lighting, and suddenly I am tasked with lighting what I consider difficult scenes. I write this post in the hope that someone can provide me with some general guidelines

The picture shows a scene I am trying to light; the drillfloor of an offshore drilling rig. It´s supposed to be a combination of natural outdoor light and floodlights. I dont have a particular reference, its only supposed to look good in one way or the other.
Don´t mind the current lighting and materials - its all preliminary.

The problem is that the floor is tightly packed with machines. This makes light placement very difficult. Other objects gets over-exposed lighting when I try to get good lighting on a hero object with some variant of three-point lighting. I use Vray Exposure and Vray Physical Camera with default settings, except a completey neutral tint.

I adjust the brightness with the intensity multiplier of each light. Is it possible to get higher brightness and lower over-exposure by adjusting ISO, F-stop and shutter speed instead? What are the practical differences of the three dials in my situation? Will they affect brightness and over-exposure differently? (I understand that they give different results in motion blur and depth of field)

Are there any tutorials, either paid or free, that can teach me how to light complex scenes like this? All I find lights normal interiors with daylight through a window and\or a couple of lamps. Or a few objects outdoors. The mix of interior and exterior lighting and a ton of tightly packed objects in this scene makes every attempt I do look terrible, and I am at a loss on how to approach this. The only good thing is that I can light it in any way I see fit ... I hope some of you can help putting me on the right path on how to approach this scene

[guillaumelepage]

I think you should try to position light sources where they would be if this was reality. Maybe a couple light fixtures under the balconies and square lights above oriented as large windows would be a good starting point. If you do that, then it's going to look real and then it's about fine tuning the intensities.

[joconnell]

+1 for what guillaume wrote above, the normal rule for industrial things is you need to have adequate lighting on all catwalks and you need lights in areas where humans have to work so they can see adequately. I did a job recently in an industrial area and we had a lot of spot lights up on walls and poles around the area - if you model an actual light fixture then it's got a reason to be up on the wall and if there's some kind of adjustable bracket in the model, you can happily aim it wherever you need light to aim.

In the image below you can see that there's lights on the walls everywhere! You can have small lights on the floors pointing upwards at surfaces and other lights around the perimeter pointing in to the shot, lots of possibilities!

[hardrock_ram]

Okay, I will try the approach you guys suggest.

Bumping the question about light intensity vs. camera settings:

I adjust the brightness with the intensity multiplier of each light. Is it possible to get higher brightness and lower over-exposure by adjusting ISO, F-stop and shutter speed instead? What are the practical differences of the three dials in my situation? Will they affect brightness and over-exposure differently? (I understand that they give different results in motion blur and depth of field)

Do you have any opinions about that?

[kosso_olli]

+1 for what guillaume wrote above, the normal rule for industrial things is you need to have adequate lighting on all catwalks and you need lights in areas where humans have to work so they can see adequately. I did a job recently in an industrial area and we had a lot of spot lights up on walls and poles around the area - if you model an actual light fixture then it's got a reason to be up on the wall and if there's some kind of adjustable bracket in the model, you can happily aim it wherever you need light to aim.

In the image below you can see that there's lights on the walls everywhere! You can have small lights on the floors pointing upwards at surfaces and other lights around the perimeter pointing in to the shot, lots of possibilities!

Jo, is the image you posted a render from V-Ray?

[dgruwier]

Light intensity, ISO, F-stop, shutter and anything else you can adjust to affect the brightness in the scene will affect it in essentially the same way.
I think what you're asking about has to do with dynamic range. Real world cameras reduce the contrast of the images they take so highlights don't blow out. VRay has more dynamic range than any camera could ever possibly have, but by default it's DISPLAYED in sRGB in the frame buffer which has very little dynamic range, so you don't get to see any of that in practice. Try opening the exposure controls in the frame buffer and setting Highlight Burn to something like 0.5, you'll see some of the highlights coming back.

Basically you want to render to something like openEXR which retains the dynamic range of the raw render, then in compositing you want to grade the images to compress the highlights and reduce the contrast, or use a color space that rolls off the highlights for you, which is how cameras do it. In VFX, it's common to preview renders in the color space originally used to shoot whatever you're working on, which also gives you whatever apparent dynamic range those cameras had.

[hardrock_ram]

David Gruwier, good to hear. Then I know my camera settings isn´t getting in the way at least. I understand dynamic range and fixing it in post. This is the way I have done it previously, but the problems in this scene made me question the way I do things ...

[Ihno]

I find light select is very usefull to identify which lights are causing the burnouts especially in a scene with so manny lights.
Download the script here: link (take the v1.32 if you don't need the new modes from next, the last one is a little messy)
It'll save you tons of time and helps you keeping everything in control.
You can then add the light selects on top of each other in a compositing application like fusion and apply indivitual color corrections to some lights to get rid of the last over-exposed areas.
Thats how I do it. I'm not a super hollywood highlevel lighting artist like john, though.

See how the image he posted seperates background from foreground by different light colors.
That's a good Idea in such complex environments to give the viewer more orientation.

[hardrock_ram]

Ihno, I have actually written something like that myself. Its part of a larger script to handle exr render elements.
The problem here is more how I should approcah lighting the scene in the first place though. Fine tuning lights in post is fine, as long as the lighting is reasonably good in the first place ...

[dgruwier]

I think that's a good approach. Fixing highlights in post shouldn't be a crutch, but it's definitely fine to at the very least give yourself the same range as a real world photographer would have to work with, by using a view transform other than sRGB. And in a scene like this with objects very close to their light sources, you will definitely have highlights blowing out in sRGB.

[joconnell]

Jo, is the image you posted a render from V-Ray?

Jeez I wish - random google image search but the job I was doing was the drydock of a shipping yard - there aren't as many metal surfaces and bits of machinery but it's the same type of lighting.