are you really using ambient lighting? looks like you got a few spot lights or something that casts shadows

ambient light is something i refuse to use (it just seems fake)

it looks like you should light the flames with a point light (like banksta did with his lamp render)
and then have a low intensity directional light shining through the windows, colour it grey and call it moon light

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that's a "Ch" pronounced as a "K"

Computer skills I should have:
Objective C, C#, Java, MEL. Python, C++, XML, JavaScript, XSLT, HTML, SQL, CSS, FXScript, Clips, SOAR, ActionScript, OpenGL, DirectX
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I'll give that a try and see how it looks Chirone, thanks for the ideas! Will post again when I've stopped fiddling around with the floor texturing...

A little progression has been made! Not changed the light set up yet as I have been concentrating on the floor texturing, will be doing a bit more to that today and then I'll have a play about with the lighting again.

Ambient lights are horrid.

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"No pressure, no diamonds" Thomas Carlyle

That's fair enough, I will try out some other lighting but it'll mean changing the settings on every shader so I'll leave it til last thing, so whoever doesn't like it'll just have to wait! lol! I can see your points and as I'm only learning I'll give anything a try, thanks for your crits all!

The shader should respond to the light regardless of the "type" of light as its just light at the end of the day, granted MR areas tend to be darker than Maya ones, but thats the light settings, as long as you have the same level of lighting whats the difference?


As a note on ambient lights, they kill off any texture detail that you may have and flatten everything, better off to use point lights or if its outdoors a group of random rotated directionals at low intensity.

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"No pressure, no diamonds" Thomas Carlyle

gster123: That's weird then,I don't have any MR shaders in the scene at all, but when I change them to point lights everything gets kind of black and white looking and there's far too much detail! I guess as you say the ambient lights flatten everything so maybe I've got the bump maps set too high to compensate for that and when I switch lights it brings that out. I'll give that a try, thanks for the heads up mate!

This is an interesting thread as most cg is about lighting.

I think i would be tempted to get rid of the windows on 1 wall, your creating what would be a nice light corridor and trying to make it look dark, plus shadows from one set of windows are falling on the opposite windows which complicates the scene.

Have you tried to place a light outside the corridor and use GI?

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free memory low..exception thrown

paldav: Well at least I'm provoking some thoughts! It is meant to be dark as it's a dungeon, and the scene of a death so the mood was meant to be grim, I did try it with light from outside but that seemed to confuse people as to where it was coming from. I haven't tried GI or anything in mentalray yet as I'm using that to render my challenge entry so I'm stuck with the maya software renderer for now until that's done, I was only doing this scene for a bit of practice, but I'm glad it's got a few peoples minds ticking over, thanks for all the input from everyone, it's all helping!

are all your lights white? it looks like they are.

h.h: Yeah they are, I tried with a hint of red but it made the whole scene look crap, I definitely need practice on lighting, I suck at it! lol...