Lack of Bounce Lighting

Dominic Sewell

Hi guys,

im currently setting up some blockout and first pass lighting for a small scene im working on, althouugh this is a night time scene i feel like im not getting the amount of bounce lighting from GI id like.

Im under the impression its standard to set all materials to 18% mid grey value to begin with before i get in to actual colour bouncing. Ive done this and have currently 4 lights in the scene, one spot shining through the window to mimmick moonlight (set to intensity 10000) and numerous smaller lamp light sources (set to 500 intensity)

However all this being said i have set my number of indirect light bounces to 5 and even 10 and im not getting the level of GI i want in the room. a sky light (set to intensity 2) does brighten the room but also washes out  the scene. I'd like to achieve a good value of GI and understand my lighting without having to over expose the skylight.

any ideas?

Without Skylight


With Skylight

Window Spotlight Radius


All help is welcome thanks guys!

Obscura

For the moon you should rather use a directional light so it doesn't loose intensity with attenuation. As for the bounces, you can increase the GI contribution per light with the indirect lighting intensity setting on them. There is also a parameter in the world settings, to set the amount of bounces directly.

Dominic Sewell

@ObscuraThank you i was aware of the amount of world bounces but the Contribution per light was really helpful!

leleuxart

You might have also done this, but make sure your exposure is locked. It's a good idea when first testing the preliminary light intensities/bounces, but don't forget! If you have any color grading/LUT enabled already, disable those as well.

Skylight bounces, in my opinion, weren't that useful pre- 4.18. I generally don't increase the skylight too much from the default 1, but it depends on what it captures. What are you doing for the sky? Is it fog or an HDRI? 

Like Obscura said, switch to the Directional Light for the exterior light coming through, but if you stick with a Spotlight, I'd disable Inverse Square Falloff to reduce attenuation decay. This will change the intensity from Lumens to an arbitrary value like the sun as well. Your lack of light bounce might simply be from the low intensity.