Desperately in need of help with Interior Lighting

[cosmo77]

I have been using Vray for about a year now but this is my first interior project and I am at my wits end. For the life of me, I cannot figure out how to get good secondary light diffusion in my scene. I have created vray portal lights, changed my secondary bounce multiplier, and even tried extreme color mapping settings such as 15:1 with no luck. Here is an example of what I am getting with my current settings. The floor should be a light brownish tone and the outer edge a neutral gray. As you can see, the dining area is appearing very dark despite having a bright sun and skylight outside the window openings. This image was created with the darkness multiple at 15:1 HSV exponential. Anything lower and the scene renders almost completely black except for the patch of direct sunlight on the floor. I have tried secondary direct computation at 4 / 12 settings as well as photon mapping, but neither seems to be working for me.

http://members.shaw.ca/cosmo77/example.jpg

I was similarily stumped trying to create the corridor lighting. I ended up having to create two Vray lights for each light fixture as using spotlamps I was unable to have any control over the decay settings. Now I have something that works, but is slower than molasses in january rendering. Could some kinda soul please take a look at my scene when they have some free time (whats that? ) and see if you have any better luck with than I am having. Right now the scene is fairly rough, as I have spent all my time trying different settings to no avail to get my lighting to look correct. All the corridor wall sconces are instanced (two lights a piece), as are the potlamps in the vestibule areas. I usually can figure my way out of problems, but I have now spent the better part of three days trying to get to grips with interior lighting and now come to you guys humbly asking for your assistance. Any help would be graciously appreciated. Here is a link to the file:

http://members.shaw.ca/cosmo77/test.rar

[percydaman]

took a look at your file. Coupla points.

Dont use skylight portals. They dont work as well as invisible vraylights. So use them in windows. Dont even need to use skylight, just slows down scenes where you have very little chance of gettings decent amounts of skylight into your scene.

Use lightmaps if at all possible. Very fast. I think my colormapping was only like 2.5 for this image. Without more light sources, say ceiling lighting, might be harder to get it lighter. Psrdon low shadow detail, low map settings.




Hallway image. Use as few as arealights as possible. really bogs down the scene. I had to delete ALL your lights and start over. Dont use 2 vray lights for one light fixture. Use 1 circular vraylight, and adjust.



These hotel type of hallways are always dark anyways. One thing you can do is use mtl override and give everything lighter diffuse map, save irradiance map and then switch to your materials and rerender with saved irradiance map. Can help to lighten things up. Also use Material Wrapper and play with GI settings.

Hope that helps some.

[cosmo77]

Thank you very much Percy, that looks a million times better. What sort of light intensity id you use for the window openings? I was unsure as to what values I should be using indrect sunlight. What sort of settings did you use for the circular lights in the hall? I had tried them before but it seemed like the like decayed too quick. For example, if I set the spherical lighting to a value of 25-30 with a size of 7.5 units (about the size of a lightblub), I got one tiny hotspot on the wall and very quick termination of the light. I think for the meantime, I am going to have to go back and fall back on the old scanline renderer for this project as I need to have the thing done by Monday and I still don't feel confident enough in my Vray abilities to follow through using this renderer. As powerful as the renderer is, the learning curve is amazing steap - more of a learning wall.

Once again, thank you for you time. I will have to try the beta out on my spare machine so that I cam give the new lightmapping feature a try.

BTW, sorry for all the questions. :P

[percydaman]

dont recall what the intensity of window lights were. 11 i think. the spherical wall lights I made just slightly larger then the glass. then played with the intensity. OH, and the lamp glass itself I made a vraylight material. also in the latest build.