Although the scene looks good, you notice that the shadows of the objects that touch the ground are almost not existent.

It is incorrect to place the light of the chandelier in a scene with the sun so pronounced.

I can not add other lights to get more shade otherwise the shadows will not correspond to the external source ...

I remember a scene like this where someone (I think BB) has added some lights, but no longer find the post.

How can I do ?

Lights suggest ?

I'm not sure my reply is going to be very helpful to you, but anyway ...

I think your shadows are fine as they are: you have sharp shadows where one would expect them to b,e but also soft shadows just where you'd expect them too.

I'd leave the lighting pretty much as it is be happy with it :-)

Here what happens, she is clearly too dark despite the strong sun outside, in reality this does not happen, so I have to correct it, but how ?

and still think that the seats behind the V4 should have shade to the left, which clearly is not.

this is a problem that I have often noticed.

As in this case when i put  characters in the scene that seems properly lit, characters do not look good with lights.

Many thanks.

First, I agree with snarly the shadows look fine, Try a soft fill light or emmitter, just as in photography a photographer would use a flash fill light to correct for lighting situations.

Experiment untill you get the look you want

my 2 cents:

as Snarly states shadows don't look too bad given the low position of the sun.

but to raise the brightness contrasts in the interior, I suggest to pump up the raytrace bounds (to max), indirect light quality (80%) and maybe irradiance caching (no need to go over 80%) in that order. You may need longer render times, just experiment. Due to the increased internal lighting level, you might like to reduce the sun intensity.

when using indirect lighting with a sun, additional lighting is an option like using flash in natural lit / daylight conditions in photography. IDL is good in lighting, not in shadowing, and you might like the shadowing for extra depth. Thinking as a photographer leads the way, in most cases.

"soft fill light or emmitter" with or without shadows ?

observing the scene, where it may be advisable to place it ?

thanks.

PLace the character where she will actually be in the scene. Then just experiment with different setups untill you get the look you want. You can do test renders at fairly low quality settings to speed up the process and still have a pretty good idea what the finished scene will look like.

"Thinking as a photographer" then trouble is that i'm not a photographer

Seem very realistic to me. Happens all the time in photography. Hence flash bulbs and extensive (and expensive) lighting setups.

Attached Link: http://scottfoto.blogspot.ca/2011/12/on-fly-lighting-demonstration.html

Try and find a real photo (or several) that has similar lighting conditions, doesnt have to be exact but similar. Study the lighting in the photos to see how they produce shadows etc.

You can bring such photos into photoshop or any image editor and change the the eyedropper or color picker from RGB to HSB (hue, saturation,brightness) place your color picker over the light coming in the windows and note the brightness level (B) then sample an area on people in the scene and note the brightness level there. Compare the ratio between the two and use this as a guide for setting up your lighting intensities

Quote - Here what happens, she is clearly too dark despite the strong sun outside, in reality this does not happen, so I have to correct it, but how ?

In reality it does happen. Just like that. All the time.

I'm a professional wedding photographer, and dealing with lighting like this is something I face every week, in reality. Your image, and figure, looks exactly as I would expect given the conditions.

This is why photographers have to manipulate the lighting using flash and reflectors (or use clever post-processing) in these situations.

I think you're confusing what you want to see with what you would see in reality.

HumHum

IC 2  and IDL 10, 2 raytrace bounce?

Too low!

Script---> partner---->Dimension 3d---> render firefly

Enable indirect light

Intensity: 1

Bounces: 5-7 (draft-HQ)

Samples 1024-4096 (draft-hq)

Irradiance catch 32-64 (Draft-HQ)

Sky light ?

PS: pixels samples 14 and no depht of fiels or 3d motion blur!?

Useless: set ixels samples to 8.

PS

xpdev, I'd say your lighting is probably physically accurate. But you don't want that, so you need to think more in terms of lighting the interior the way you would for a photo shoot or as if it were a film set.

How you do that is part of the creative endeavour: you could try putting a big reflector in the room to bounce 'sunlight' back into the scene; or add some spotlights; or 'overexpose' by cranking the sunlight up to something crazy like 400% (which will burn out highlights outside the room - physically accurate).

Don't forget, photo-realism and physical accuracy are not the same thing. So you could experiment with GC values: see what happens if you raise GC to 5.0!

EDIT: cross-posted with Snarly: we're saying essentially the same thing and since I also used be a pro photographer you should assume that we know what we're talking about.

Your setting

My draft: 5 bounces

My HQ: 7bounces

i'm not near my pc now, i'll do tomorrow some test using your suggestion.

many thanks to everyone

Kalrua, is that scene enclosed? Upping bounces doesn't do much unless the light has something to bounce off off. You need an envsphere or renderroom or some other enclosing structure, or your rays will just shoot off into space and never bounce back.

Quote - The scene consists of a single external light (sun) set at 150% (100% shade), more 'I can not raise it otherwise the outside would not watchable.

Inreality, exactly that would be the case. If you are in a closed buildingwhere bright daylight enters through one window, it will pretty much be impossible to take a photograph where both interior as well as exterior are properly exposerange dynamic range is just too large to be captured on film.

I think that it's a very realistic looking scene. But why are the shadows so jaggy on the floor? And what causes the ugly splotchs above the window frames?

For me, it's those issues that reveal it as a Poser render.

I'm just trying to learn here, as I have been away from Poser a very long time and I'm seeing those same issues in my renders.

Ah, yes, Subject Brightness Range (SBR) is one of the things we had to account for in Ye Olden Dayes (actually still relevant in this digital age) - a spot meter and Ansell Adams' zone system were the tools we used to determine that, and what was required to get the best fit into the film's dynamic range.

Lots of exposure / development / printing techniques available if shooting black and white, but for colour transparencies, supplemental lighting was the only real option. If that wasn't possible,  the mantra was to expose for the brightest significant highlight and let the shadows take care of themselves (which usually meant allowing them to clog up).

In Poser and other 3D apps we have full control of the lighting, so you'd think it would be easy to get it right.

There's an interesting debate to be had here about why 'physically accurate' light modelling doesn't always produce what we expect to see: and more interesting still is what drives those expectations.

EDIT: Roy G, I suspect the render was done with 'draft quality' settings (for a quick preview) rather than 'final' quality, which would greatly reduce the artifacts.

Quote - There's an interesting debate to be had here about why 'physically accurate' light modelling doesn't always produce what we expect to see: and more interesting still is what drives those expectations.

Now that would be an interesting thread ...

in addition, I agree with the others - your render settings are too low to get good dynamic range inside.  whilst I don't know why the windowpane shadows have jagged edges (may be jpeg artifact), other problems may be fixed by using 8 or 16 raytrace bounces, IC 100 and IDL quality 100.

Quote - There's an interesting debate to be had here about why 'physically accurate' light modelling doesn't always produce what we expect to see: and more interesting still is what drives those expectations.

I'd expect that someone coming from a photographic background would have different expectations of what a 2d representation of a 3d world (digital or real) would likely look like.

I see thousands and thousands of people every week taking pictures at night of architectural landmarks across the street from them, and these people are using point and click cameras, flashing away. These are not people who understand cameras. But they expect the camera to reproduce what their eyes see, and they use the flash because it's the default setting when you're about to seriously underexpose otherwise.

Photographers expect the camera to reproduce the scene according to their experience of and/or knowledge about using the device under those particular conditions.

You know exactly what every one of those night time pictures of the legislature buildings taken by tourists with an iPhone is going to look like. They don't -- until they see the dark brown mud with a few wobbly lights that they've photographed. Then they proudly post it on Facebook anyway.

Quote - > Quote - There's an interesting debate to be had here about why 'physically accurate' light modelling doesn't always produce what we expect to see: and more interesting still is what drives those expectations.

Now that would be an interesting thread ...

It's been touched on in others: a few months back there was a thread about moonlit scenes where the issue came up. In that particular case, there were three issues: the way the human eye sees, what's actually there, and what a camera would see depending on the exposure settings.

For instance, I have images of a clear full moon night taken in winter. I took multiple exposures until the level of brightness was what I judged I perceived with my eyes. The scene was much more colourful than what I saw because the camera boosted light levels across the spectrum, whereas what I saw "live" had very subdued colours because human low-light vision has very poor capacity to distinguish colour.

A large part of the problem is that people forget (or don't know) that our eyes and brain form a complex image processing system that's constantly adjusting focus and exposure levels in fractions of a second which are then combined into a picture that is more complex than a single "image" coming through the system at any one time.

Thanks to all for help and suggestions

Now I devote myself to different tests based on your suggestions.

Quote - There's an interesting debate to be had here about why 'physically accurate' light modelling doesn't always produce what we expect to see: and more interesting still is what drives those expectations.

Interior lighting is not always as cut and dry as some people make it out to be.

You can change render settings all day, but if the textures are not set up right it wont be accurate. It can't be in that case.

That's first thing that came to my mind when looking at the OPs render, what are the texture setups?

You can have all the IDL bounces, pixel samples, etc, you want. But if the textures are not set up accordingly it will make very little difference in the overall shading.

The first thing you need for physically accurate lighting is an accurate enviroment.

Ok, but shadows are shadows, if i don't see them i can't see them simply modifyng textures, i think

in older versions of poser, users sometimes requested shader settings such that a surface wouldn't accept shadows, but none of those in OP's render look like that.  it's also possible that a material will have gamma settings that affect how it renders, but those furnitures and floors may have ordinary settings with no gamma correction in the shaders.

I see the shadows just fine. What is expected here, black?

Change the floor to white and look again.

Hum.... Can you tell me where see to know if material has right gamma settings and how correct them if i use a GC 2.2 in my final render ?

Many thanks

Are you asking about material gamma settings because of what Miss Nancy said?

Because I see no reason to discuss material gamma - you obviously don't know anything about that and you aren't using my shaders and I don't know anybody else who puts gamma into materials.

Does your floor shader have a PM:Gamma node in it? If not, it's not my shader. If so, does it say (Auto)? If so, you don't need to worry about it. If you have PM:Gamma and it doesn't say Auto, then it matters, and it should be set to 1 if you have render GC set to 2.2. However, as I said, I don't see any evidence of this.

I see nothing wrong with your image regarding light and shadow. I don't understand what you want to change. It is behaving correctly. I see bright sunlight. I see soft diffuse bounced secondary lighting. I see darker floor under furniture.

Perhaps what is broken is your monitor.

xp, if the floor area below looks unrealistic to you, one thing I noticed when viewing a similar scene in a room here:  the light interaction between the furniture and the floor is more dramatic if the floor shows reflections.

whilst increasing certain IDL variables may help get some kind of shadow near the front leg of that table, assuming you're not using any of bill's shaders excepting on the envsphere, maybe the tiles can be slightly reflective, as it's not going to show much shadow under the table on the side facing the sun, and it can't show contact shadows where the table leg touches the tile.

Compared to the first rendering of this post, I added externally to the windows (on right and left) a light emitter.

I also added a little flare to the floor, seems to be a bit more realistic.

I used BB Glossy for wood and everything seems much more realistic.

I always render at low resolution, so the imperfections are due to settings

• first problem:  the light emitters on the outside of the windows are visible in the reflection on the floor, there is a solution for this ?

many thanks

Now I ask you which of the 2 images is more realistic?

For me the first, but I'm not a big expert on lights.

I changed the angle of the light emitting placed outside the windows, there is a slight improvement

to get a good result on the skin of V4 but I had to use a specular light and change the skin with EZSkin

otherwise the result is always horrible

I am doing the rendering ...

Quote - Now I ask you which of the 2 images is more realistic?

For me the first, but I'm not a big expert on lights.

The second is more realistic.

What you seem concerned with is exposure. What I'm concerned with in realism is not exposure, since exposure levels can be anything you set them to, even in real life.

What is unrealistic here is an expectation that a properly exposed interior and exterior are simultaneously possible. This is only possible if you manipulate the image, as is done in real photography.

In this room, except for points near the windows, almost all the sky light is obstructed. As well, only small patches of sunlight enter and hit the floor. So, overall, about 1/10th of the light that is hitting outdoor objects would reach this interior. The outside is at least 10 times brighter than the inside. At least.

I find your brighter image looks totally fake to me. In that case, if the inside was exposed enough to look bright, then the outdoor part should be completely blown out, mostly white.

There are hundreds of photos demonstrating this.

We don't have a camera "exposure" setting in Poser. To get the same effect, you cannot make the camera more sensitive - you have to make the light brighter.

Set the infinite light that is your sun to 800% intensity.

Set the sky dome to at least 500% intensity.

Then you will begin to approximate a realistic indoor photograph that is well lit.

Or - put some lights on inside - that's what real photographers do.

Example:

http://juliestahrphotography.blogspot.com/

More

http://villamil.org/?m=200802

http://www.phototechnique.com/how-to/how-to-capture-interiors/

http://larrylohrman.wordpress.com/category/flash-technique/

http://insights.betterphoto.com/favorite_places/

http://a1virtualtours.blogspot.com/2010/01/tips-on-using-point-and-shoot-camera.html

http://melbourne-leader.whereilive.com.au/property/story/shoot-for-the-best-1/

http://trekkingtripod.com/2011/12/31/hdr-tutorial-what-is-hdr/

ok BB you have been clear

admitted that I do not want to massively increase the external light to prevent burning the view of the garden, give me an advice where put the interior lights and wich type of light to use.

So i learn other things from you, like using GC wich you recommended me months ago

Many thanks

If you're doing an "arranged" piece, such as real photographers do for real estate, this article gives good ideas.

http://www.flickr.com/groups/strobist/discuss/72157600081467414

I don't think any setup works universally.

Or if you're going for natural artificial (if I my be permitted to say that), I usually suggest that you look in the room for modeled lights and put Poser lights there. You have a big ceiling lamp in there. Any reason why you don't want to turn it on?

I use spot lights or point lights, depending on the situation.

the only thing that keeps me from putting artificial lights in the room for my case are the shadows that make artificial daylight illumination, which is what I not desire.

your link is very interesting, I did not believe in the reality that even the photographers encounter problems similar to our lighting

I'll do some tests to understand how to manage the shadows with artificial lights

If you position a light exactly where the camera is, you will see no shadows at all from that light. Every object that casts a shadow will prevent you from seeing its shadow, by definition.

Bounced light (off walls and ceilings) will produce very soft and indistinct shadows - as you've already seen.

Also, for point and spot lights, you can set the shadow blur radius very high (and raise the shadow samples to keep them from being grainy).

Wow BB, i did not know this thing, thank you so much

unfortunately I'm on vacation with my wife and I can not do rendering, but I have very interested in the discussion