Best technique for illuminating a large indoor enviroment?
Hi there,
As a newbie to lighting in Maya, I’m trying my best to illuminate a large indoor environment, which in this case is planned to be a subway station.
My first thoughts was to place out lights as they would have been appeared in reality, but since there is such a large number of lights in the scene, the render time starts to reach beyond the limits of what’s possible to animate later on.
The test scene that I've attached is filled with one cylindrical shaped area light per lampshade and took about 40 minutes to render out, even though it doesn’t contain any advanced geometry or materials what so ever.
So what’s the best technique to approach an efficient but yet realistic lighting for a scene of this kind?
All help is appreciated!
As a newbie to lighting in Maya, I’m trying my best to illuminate a large indoor environment, which in this case is planned to be a subway station.
My first thoughts was to place out lights as they would have been appeared in reality, but since there is such a large number of lights in the scene, the render time starts to reach beyond the limits of what’s possible to animate later on.
The test scene that I've attached is filled with one cylindrical shaped area light per lampshade and took about 40 minutes to render out, even though it doesn’t contain any advanced geometry or materials what so ever.
So what’s the best technique to approach an efficient but yet realistic lighting for a scene of this kind?
All help is appreciated!
Replies
First, I'd suggest consider what are the materials you will use. Are you going to use the standard ''lambert, blinn, phong stuff or are you going to use mia mat for phsycally accurated renditions?
Tale a look at this for materials selection.
http://docs.autodesk.com/MENTALRAY/2013/ENU/mental-ray-help/files/shaders/architectural/arch_mtl.html
As for the light themselves. Outdoor lighting can be tricky since if you do final gathering, the light rays will bounce back to the sky (so your render will look bland if there aren't enough object in your scene).
Since you're a beginner (as I also am), I'd suggest you 2 choices:
Create an IBL (image based lightning)..
or even easier:
Create a physcial sun and sky.
EDIT: Oh my! I'm sorry, I read ''outdoors in stead of indoors''. In this instance, indoor renders are a lot more easier to handle.
Ok, first how many lights are there in your scene? If Maya starts to lag or if the render itself takes too much time, you could divide your scene into multiple render layers (are you familiar with that?).
Thank you for your time.
The test render that I've attached contains about 20 lights, but the real scene with the station will contain a lot more.
All lights will however not be visible at the same time, and it might look something like the test render.
I'm not too familiar with render layers, but I do suspect that it won't affect the render time in a situation where the camera is constantly moving through the scene? Or am I wrong?
From what I've learned, you should always use the mia materials when rendering with MR, or else the light won't behave realistic, but perhaps it slows down the render time remarkably?
Use mia_material with mental ray, always.
Final gather and photons work really nice together.
Light bounce is a big factor in indoor lightning.
Respect the unit lengths if you don't want to render in trial/error style.
And LINEAR WORKFLOW is the key to achieve realism in lightning.
Real light profiles is a time saver.
Hi,
Yes, I have planned to use mia materials in a linear workflow, and would also prefer to use light profiles if possible.
However, the real issue here is that it takes too much time to render out all light sources that I would like to have in the scene.
I'm aiming at around 10 min/frame, which at the moment seems to be impossible.
Got any suggestions?