I’m working on an animation and when I reach this particular part of the model that is intended to have very dramatic (high contrast) lighting things surfaces are appearing very washed out and flat. the only light sources are coming from the clerestory in the top right and the same sunlight emanating from below (with a little bit of light coming from the room to the left). The goal is to achieve a look where there’s a more pronounced gradient of light to shadow coming from those sources so this space feels more dynamic in terms of lighting conditions, but right now it is super flat and life-less.
I achieved this look more or less in a still rendering (below) which required a great deal of photoshop to achieve that look as I couldn’t get it natively in Enscape. Now that I’m doing an animation I need to achieve that look within the program itself.
I’m trying to accentuate the light coming from the clerestory by placing rectangular lights directly in front of the window. Those are cranked to max brightness and help a little bit, but not much. I’ve tried a similar approach of placing rectangular lights around that datum above the windows, but rather than accentuating that gradient, instead it just washes out the lighting even further.
Interestingly, when enscape first starts rendering the scene, the lighting actually looks more or less correct. This screenshot is from immediately after the scene first updated after moving the lights at the bottom.
However, as enscape continues to render the scene, suddenly everything gets washed out again. This is what that same exact view looks like after giving enscape a minute to finish rendering the scene. All of that depth and contrast disappears completely.
I’ve tried many different lighting conditions and settings and nothing comes close to achieving what I’m trying to get. I tried a version that exclusively used sunlight and that made it even worse and I tried a version with only artificial lights to the same effect.
Ambient brightness is set to 0%. Auto-exposure is off (but turning it on doesn’t really make a difference). Sun brightness and artificial light brightness are at their default settings. Playing with those values hasn’t yielded significant results.
Note that this space by design doesn’t have any direct light entering it (Aside from further down as visible in the finished rendering from earlier) so changing the time of day doesn’t really make any difference.