lighting a house

banksta · 06-06-2007

I have the first floor of my house modeled out for a camera animation. Before I add any more furniture to my scene I would like to know how you get the feel of darkness in all room while still being able to see some detail.Three of my rooms need to be dark but show the detail of the furniture some and the empty room needs to be completely dark.I have a screen shot of the layout of my model. Also the environment outside will be of a stormy environment,I will be adding particles to make rain hit the windows and have thunder. How should I do the outside environmentit. A sky dome or half a dome to cover where the windows are. Also should I use a HDRI image to light the environment or map the lighting to the environment. If anyone can help I will appreciate it. I have two weeks left before its do. If I can get the lighting and environment done I will be able to knock out the camera fly through pretty easy.

I would like to know how you get the feel of darkness in all room while still being able to see some detail.Three of my rooms need to be dark but show the detail of the furniture some and the empty room needs to be completely dark.

Originally Posted by

It's called lighting.... you need to statr experimenting with lights in your scene. There's no hard and fast way of doing it so you just need to have a go. I warn you it may not be easy. You will need to use things like decay to get nice falloffs from your light to leave areas of darkness. But remember that in CG if there is no light then it will be pure black. In an environment such as yours there will never be anywhere that is completley black. There's always some light. But dont use ambient lights, they will flatten out your lighting.

I suggest you start with no lights and turn off the "use default light" in the render globals. Then using the maya software renderer start to add lights one at a time. All you need are spotlights (with penumbra falloff) and a few point lights. Dont worry about rayracing or reflections or anything like that for now. Get the basics of lighting down. Then you can worry more about the more advanced techniques such as HDRI lighting. Don't run before you can walk. I would forget about the outside for now. If you only have to worry about the windows (plus it's stormy outside) you can do it with a photo or simple geometry. It's the least of your worries right now!! user added image

Whats' the main focus of the project? modelling? lighting? realism?

user added image

Alan

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