Hi all,

Ok.  I have Vue 6 and Poser 6, as well as Skin Vue 6.  I am finally ready to really get down and produce some high quality renders, mostly for sequential art/comics.

The first scene I would like to do will be an indoor scene, daytime, with a man and a woman.  Now, I would like to go for a higher realism than most renders,but also want to make sure each panel doesn't take forever and a day.

I've seen some great art around, a not a few tutorials, but  I am really having trouble lighting an entire scene, background and all. I've got a good grasp of 3 point lighting, but it doesn't help get the background into the picture.  I have also tried radiosity and GI and don't seem to be having too much luck.

Can someone point me in the right direction of some tutorials that will help me light an interior scene?  I would really appreciate any help I can get.

Thanks,

Fyre

Indoor scenes really need radiosity. Has the room many windows? Is it day or night? Vue6 now has area lights. This means any object can be turned into a light source. How about making your windows area lights?

Hmm...just one window.  Never thought about the area lights. 

I will give radiosity another shot.  I will post an attempt here.

Thanks, bruno021, I'll keep you posted.

Here is a scene I am working on.  Forgive the focalpoint and pose...this is a test.  Also, the wood floor does add a lot of color.

I have indicated where the lights are.  The quadratic not only lit the figure,but also added to the entire room.  The point light in back was an accident, but kind of looks good.

This is on Final with 0.00 in the quality for the atmosphere editor.

Let me know what you think.  I am not quite sure I like it, but don't know why.

Thanks,

Fyre

It looks quite alright, I think. How about another point light at the top of the stairs, Surely, there are windows up there to fake. the spotlight may be too strong, or maybe it shouldn't lit the floor, it looks too bright. Another small point light on the right corner of the room would lighten up this dark corner. What I find a little disturbing is the overall yellow-orange colour in this scene. Maybe you should chage the overall sky colour and ambient light colour to a light blue colour and ses if it looks better. 
Just a few thoughts.

Thanks...I will try that.  I appreciate all the help.  It is definitely the floor causing the yellow/orange cast.  I will try to change the lighting.  Radiosity is still such a mystery to me.

Also, a great idea about not having the spot light illuminate the floor.  Working mostly in Poser, I forget that you can "tell" lights not to illumnate certain objects.
I will post another round a little later.

Thanks again bruno...this is invaluable.

Fyre

Check this great site for help on indoor lighting from  JC:
http://www.art-head-start.com/tutorial-lighting-interiors-1.html

I'd aim the spotlight down from a higher angle (notice how the top of the sofa cushions are dark - not too realistic, i think).

Good that you used a Quadratic spot indoors! You can turn off the spotlight influence on the floor and/or make the floor darker in the Material Editor (the ambient slider will have the most influence on the GR indirect light reflections).

Agree with Bruno's ideas on changing the warm color cast.

It's not a bad render - doesn't have those "too light" corner seams that one gets from too much GR gain.

If you find soft shadows or other areas getting "grainy", try the new soft shadow smoothing feature in the Light & Shadow Editor - much faster than Object anti-aliasing. But you might have to enable a bit of soft shadow (1%) to turn that feature on.

You might want to check the ratio of your sunlight intensity Vs spotlight intensity. For a daylight scene, one would expect the sunlight to be noticably brighter than any artificial lights (unless you intend a "restricted lighting" look. Also the scene dynamics, drama and 3D depth feelings will suffer if all the light sources are nearly the same brightness.

I would add a little reflection to the floor. Love esther

in the material editor, effects tab I think.

"Radiosity is still such a mystery to me. "

Remember that all Radiosity is, in this context, is the bouncing of color of one surface onto another.

From my tests, it is an enormous resource hog.  For detail that is extremely fine, and hard to detect.  And I doubt that its effects would ever be noticed in a serial comic.

I disagree. Radiosity may be what you want. I'd do a GI render and a GR render of the same scene and compare. WIth the correct "User" render settings, you can optimize GR render time - though it will always be longer than an optimized GI render.

In an outdoor scene, GR is usually not useful. But indoors, where light toned surfaces are near each other, the indirect light (not just its color) reflected and re-reflected (not just once) from surfaces to other surfaces can be much more realistic. Radiosity shows the actual light power in a scene, not just the rays-struck surfaces. It's especially effective where objects are hidden from direct light. Notice the yellow ball:

Is GR overkill? The artist must decide.

BTW, here i boosted the color reflection way more than you normally would, since that was part of the discussion i made this scene for.

Because in radiosity light bounces around from every surface you must not forget to always use a complete room. So place a large white square behind the camera (reflecting some light back in from that direction.

In an indoor studio setting, don't use sunlight, use a 3 point lighting for your main subject and add fill lights to light the rest (use at least 2 for the background and at least 1 for each additional subject, extra fill lights may be required).

In an indoor natural setting, use sunlight as the main light, add a key light over your shoulder directed to the main subject. Extra lights should only be used for dark corners (and should make sense, so a light fixture should be expected to throw this light). The human eye puts the focus on the main subject, the rest becomes a blur. In pictures we have to provide enough light and detail in the entire picture but we simulate the focus by providing a bit of extra light on the main subject.

HI,

Wow!  Thanks for all the advice.  It will take me some time to try everything.

JC,  I have read/listened to many of your tutorials and got your book!  I appreciate all the time you have devoted to the subject.

I'll be honest, farkwar, the reason I am trying to do radiosity is to speed things up as I don't have the patience to fake it with multiple positioning of numerous lights(and haven't researched how).  I may have to buckle down and do that if these experiments don't work, but being able to take one or two lights and click a button and have the room light up just makes me giddy.  I don't mind render time too much, if the initial setup is easier.  I may be off here, as again I am new to the ability of radiosity, GI or AO and am not sure if I am just better off doing the fake GI/Radiosity way.

jfbeute, I do have 4 walls on my littlle room.  I do appreciate the advice on lighting with sunlight.  By the time I am done I would like something akin to a, on location glamour/erotic shoot.

As of now, I am still getting that orange tint coming off the floor.  I may have to change it, although, once the texture is resized, I think it'll look great.

Okay, I am off now.  Thanks to all that helped.  Any other hints/tips for lighting indoors, whether GR, GI or fake, let me know.  I may do both renders and post them here for everyone.

Thanks.

Fyre

Here is a corrected image.  I am sure the spot is too bright.  I darkened the floor, and made sure the spot was not lighting it.  Changed the color of the sun, ambient light and dome all to a light blue.

Let me know what you think.  Also added a reflection, a little too much of a reflection.  Hmmm...that's about it.

Thanks all!

Fyre

One last thing.  Tried a GI render as JC suggested, but it came out like this.  Why?

Fyre

You need to understand that Global Illumination is a "generic term" for advanceddlighting techniques. Inside this term of GI, there are quite a few different solutions, from quick to very slow.
What Vue calls GI is the accurate computation and spreading of shadows, which means that it does not compute bouncing light. It justs spreads the shadows of every light source in the scene in an accurate way. So your scene will be a lot darker, Vues adds realistic shadows, but no additional lighting, and the more lights in the scene, the more shadows. GI is best used for outdoor scenes, where the light and shadows come only from the sun., otherwise, it gets too dark, like here.
Radiosity is the most advanced lighting model of the GI models. And the slowest too.

Something else to consider as well for your compositions is "natural" lighting. Looking through your renders, it almost seems they are getting progressively less realistic, at least in my opinion. Please don't be offended. Happens to me all the time.

There is a sample scene in VUE, consisting of two chairs, a coffee table, some plants, and a window. I would give you the file name but I am rendering something at the moment.

Take a look at the lighting setup for this scene. It's very well done. 

Consider using gels, soft lighting (by editing the shadow properties and dropping to 80% or so with maybe a .5 - 1.5 quality boost), reducing or eliminating object influence of certain lights as suggested, and just making sure it looks "right" to you.

As noted, the artist has to decide what is right, but it's a wonderful exercise to learn lighting, that's for sure!

Yes, i like your second render much better!

 In Vue 6i there is a new possibility, which pros use to speed render time for animations. It's called "Ambient Occlusion". I found Vue 6 Infinite's AO produced good looking interiors quickly.

The New Riders book "[digital] LIGHTING & RENDERING, Second Edition", by Jeremy Brin has a lot on multi-light interiors with windows. He demonstrates more of a search for realism than fast production though.

BTW, i was not suggesting you should use GI, just wanted you to see the difference between it and GR. Your GI could be improved, but i still favor GR. For example, by boosting the ambient in GI, you could get a better result (at the risk of getting 'grain' which you'd then have to fix with increased OAA and such - increasing render time a lot). Adding one or more fill lights (Point lights) would also work (maybe turn off their shadows). Again, more complexity.

Thanks all.

Warangel, I am not offended in the least.  I know that in order to obtain good looking, quality stuff, lighting is the key.  Any help is always appreciated.

I can do basic renders right now, but I am trying to push Vue 6, as I have seen others do, to create good stuff without having to resort to Maya or even C4D.  I think Vue can do it all in rendering terms, although maybe at the cost of  high rendering times, etc.  Stil, what I am learning here is great!

I am off to continue my exploration.  Thanks again to everyone.  I will continue to try different renders until I find something I like.