Looking for advice for a nice uniform lighting environment for cut away floorplans.

[jason_cafferty]

Hi,

I do a number of floorplans with the roof cut off and really want to get a pure white totally even lighting environment. HDRi images always have varied lighting and although having no light and using the Background only goes a long way towards this goal you then have.... a background.

The output I am after is PNG with no background, so far the best way has been an overcast HDRi made invisible with not background enabled. Can you have a pure white HDRi and would this even be a good idea? I want my floorplans to be lit evenly from all directions so all and any wise words appreciated!

[kenancakir]

I use sun for lightning for floor plan renderings, with size 200 and position is midday, almost 90 degree to the floor..

[Roo Evans]

There's 2 way to do it, the second one is more favorable in my opinion.

1. You could simply put a pure white color in the domelight slot instead of a bitmap. Just higher the intensity
2. Also a possibility (turn off sunlight and/or delete domelight). In you asset editor, go to your render settings -> environment -> background. Instead of sunlight or bitmap place a white color in there and high the intensity.

Hope that was clear and it helped you out!

[jason_cafferty]

Thanks for this, I tried using sun override settings in Vray and set it directly above / size 200. Very nice evenly lit renders but boy it's more expensive than HDRi etc. My 3950x / 3090 were wiring away for WAY longer. I believe I tried the White in the Dome light without great results but will have another go along with the background method. I will say though that I am doing large format retail layouts wit hall the fixtures and products and at 4K High+ so I guess I should expect it to take a bit of time.

[jason_cafferty]

Perhaps a dumb question but not obvious how you use just a colour for the Dome light. Referring to the attached Image, don't see what the solid colour option "1" does. You select it and can pick colours that change this swatch but has no affect on either the preview sphere nor the render !?!? Option "3" only allows selection of an image file?

[jason_cafferty]

You turn off the tick don't you, not the most obvious I must say.

[jason_cafferty]

Results are in. Sun gives the most "real" looking result but a the test scene would take 20 times longer that both Dome Light and Background methods. Dome light is the whitest result, more model looking but does get light deep down into the shadows. Setting background to White and bumping up has a little more contrast than the Dome method. Test scene finishes 1080p / High + in around 2 minutes vs 50 for sun. Dome light wins for this use case.