How can Vue 5 be set up to realistically bounce daylight into room interiors? I'm an architect and have used Vue for over a year to produce renders of proposed buildings, but find I have to fake interior views with lots of ambient light or additional point lights as sunlight doesn't bounce into rooms as it would in reality. Is this simply a limitation of Vue 5?

In the upper attached image there is a concrete shelf below the horizontal slit opening on the the right side, but as I've had to add ambient light to get a generally daylit look to the room, there are no shadows under the shelf and it's become very difficult to distinguish from the wall. As shown in the lower image, when I turn ambient light off the image is almost completely black with only very slight reflected light. I have spent literally hundreds of hours experimenting with atmosphere and rendering settings, but am now beginning to wonder if I'm missing something really obvious. I would be very, very grateful for any advice.

Thanks in advance,
Jackson

You are using Global Radiosity, correct?

would you mind sharing the scene for testing?

Perhaps increase the setting for Ambient/Sunlight towards sun and decrease the setting for Uniform/From Sky. Also you might want to check "Volumetric Sunlight" in the Fog/Haze menu.

A 10% ambiant light from sky will always make the image darker with more contrast, so I wouldn't go so extreme. Your light balance has no sunlight at all, well 3% only, so it has to be dark, and puting more skydome lighting gain won't change a bit, since you killed the light coming from the sun. For interior scenes, I always use fill lights, even with radiosity, and even in other 3D apps like C4D. Also, in real life, I'm not sure the opening in the roof and along the wall would produce enough light to get a full daylight in the room. One parameter you may need to increase too, is the radiosity gain.

The model has two light openings but they are strange openings, unusual at least, that's why I asked for the scene to test. Based on my experience, Radiosity should lighten the interior, but not in an uniform way. There would still be darker areas. I agree with Bruno that the Skydome lighting won't have much of an effect in this situation, because of the settings. Gain and Bias should work though. But to balance the effect in a correct way, one should be able to work on the original scene. Every scene requires it's own settings and as I said, this one isn't your typical standard interiors with a wall and a window. But I certainly don't have the time to model a replica of this building just for testing-replying.

Why have you not checked "indirect Reflections"? Radiosity is all about light bouncing off one object to illuminate others. I'd probably use spotlights outside the 2 openings, instead of the sun. and perhaps 1 dim interior point light to bring out your interior forms and make shadows - which adjusting the ambient won't do for you. _jc ArtHeadStart.com e-book for digital artists and students

That's right - Light Balance to Ambient has a different meaning for Radiosity than for the Standard lighting model. I would follow the setting above and maybe give the Bias a lighter shade of grey and check 'Indirect reflections'.

Another quick way to get started with Radiosity settings is simply to load a Radiosity atmosphere from the presets or to load one of the sample radiosity scenes on the Contents CD and save the atmosphere to use in your own scene, This should get you past the basic settings and closer to what you really want to do,

Interesting thread. I spent some time trying out various settings and ended up with the following 2 interior rendering tests. Both are lit with only a single spotlight and no sun.

More about how these were done can be found at: www.altuit.com/webs/altuit2/VueLab/IndoorRadiosity.htm
The scene files can be found there as well.

Message edited on: 11/27/2005 00:16

Hi all, Sorry to be so late in replying and saying thanks for all your advice- I was off sick and I am the last person in Britain without internet at home! Typically, shortly after posting I had a bit of a breakthrough- see attached image. There's no "artificial" lights- just the sun, sky and ambient light. JC and Agiel- strangely I've found checking "indirect reflections" doesn't seem to affect the image and as render times are looooong for this image I unchecked it. Nevertheless I'll try checking it again to see if it improves my results. Oreo- thanks, the Vue model to follow. Pentamiter, Bruno and MDT- thanks, your advice has helped me understand the settings a lot better. Chipp- great images! The general brightness while maintaining contrast between highlighted edges and dark corners is exactly what I've been after. I've especially found it hard to render flat white surfaces without a patchy result. I'll check out your link. Many thanks for all your advice, Jackson

Oreo- sorry, this forum won't allow Vue files to be posted. Jackson