need help lighting a room

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lordshimra

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Mar 30, 2017
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not sure if this is the right place to post this so please move it if needed. i am trying to light a bedroom scene. typical square room fan with light in ceiling. so the lady is by the door in some scantly clad clothing and the view is from the bed. when i place lights in the ceiling fan bulb they fail to light her up and the scene often is really dark. i am not using a bunch of lights at one time just trying different ones out but just failing each time. any help would be great. thanks
 
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Rich

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lordshimra said:
when i place lights in the ceiling fan bulb they fail to light her up and the scene often is really dark. i am not using a bunch of lights at one time just trying different ones out but just failing each time. any help would be great. thanks
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One of the things with 3D scene lighting is that you can't always just say "well, the real light is coming from here, so that's what I'll do." Many times you have to sort of play tricks to get good results. (They do this all the time in the movies as well.) Part of "real world" lighting is that light bounces all over the place - that lightbulb in the ceiling not only directly illuminates your subject, but you get bounces off walls, ceilings, etc. This creates diffuse, non-directional background lighting as well as the direct lighting on the subject. In theory, Daz can model this. In practice, it's hard to get this kind of effect from "just put the lights where the lights are," because it frequently takes forever for iRay to converge, since it has to simulate all those bounces.

Whether you use 3-point lighting techniques or not, you'll probably want to consider a spotlight or two on the figure you're trying to have lit. To make it look less "she has a spotlight on her," you can use a variety of techniques:
  1. Consider opening up a wall that isn't visible. Or remove the ceiling, if that isn't visible. Let exterior light in, which can be an HDRI. This gives you a much more diffuse, even lighting, and a lot of it. If you can't do this, then possibly consider a large ghost light up in the ceiling area to give you some diffuse background lighting.
  2. Set the spotlight(s) up to use rectangular shape (the default is a point light, which casts extremely hard shadows, which is visually unrealistic), and increase the area from the default 10cm x 10cm to maybe 30cm x 30cm. This will soften any shadow edges that your spotlights create, creating more of the "diffuse illumination" look that you would typically want.
  3. Possibly widen the spread angle on the spotlight from the default 60 degrees to maybe 75 or 90 degrees. Again, this spreads the light out more, creating less of a "flashlight on her" effect.
  4. Have at least two spots, one on each side of the camera and somewhat above the camera. This will cut down on "hard shadow cast on the wall" and will create a more "rounded" illumination on the figure. Assuming that gives you the effect you want, that is. Sometimes you want the kind of shadows you get with only one spotlight.
If you do open up a wall or ceiling, you may not need to have the spotlights be too intense - they may just kind of be "accent lights" to fill in darker areas. But don't put so much light on everything that you completely wash out the shadows - that looks unrealistic as well. If you look around the room you're sitting in, you'll see that there are actually a lot of subtle shadows. Ditto if you look at a person - the light on one side of the face is typically brighter than that on the other. So to keep your scene realistic-looking, you want to keep those effects. There are images I've seen that are completely lit with ghost lights - they have essentially no shadows at all. They always look "wrong," but in a way that isn't easy to identify.

Finally, assuming you have the lights and shadows the way you want them but the entire scene is still on the dark side, you can adjust the overall scene brightness by playing with the settings on the Tone Mapping panel of the Render Settings. The settings are inter-related, so you kind of have your choice of which ones you play with, but increasing the Film ISO is an easy concept to play with. (Increasing this setting makes the "film" more sensitive, meaning that the same amount of light in the screen results in a brighter-looking picture.)

Lighting isn't easy. And it's even harder for indoor scenes than for outdoor ones. So, take your time, practice, try different things. Solicit input, but don't follow it slavishly. The kind of lighting I like in a scene won't necessarily match what you like - that's one of the reasons why movies by different directors have different "looks." After a while, you'll develop your own set of "tricks of the trade" that will give you the look that you want in the scene.
 
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Joraell

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lordshimra said:
not sure if this is the right place to post this so please move it if needed. i am trying to light a bedroom scene. typical square room fan with light in ceiling. so the lady is by the door in some scantly clad clothing and the view is from the bed. when i place lights in the ceiling fan bulb they fail to light her up and the scene often is really dark. i am not using a bunch of lights at one time just trying different ones out but just failing each time. any help would be great. thanks
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Remove wall behind camera and rotate dome. Than setup your enviroment. Enviroment intensity and dome intensity. Done.
 
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