The result of the luminosity depends not only on the intensity but also on the size of the light that you create. You will notice that increasing the size of the area light you will have more or less the same effect as you would if were increasing the intensity number. The last step that you can do to improve the realism is to add a glare filter. This will give a glowing/shiny effect on the brightest parts of your surfaces. Try to always change the settings inorder to try and discover the optimal balance of size/location/intensity of the lights. I tried this tutorial with success also on interiors with more than 2 windows...for each window add a small area light and a spot light.
Problems, errors and solutions : If your render is way too dark, you probably need to just increase the intensity of your last free area light, or you must increase the size of the free area light.
- Colour-bleeding effect : To avoid this effect put a lower number in max bounces.
- Long render times : This kind of illumination requires a really long render time. To spend less time you can reduce the max bounces number to 1 or 2 and make all the lights a bit brighter.
- The rendering is full of big dark dots : This happens if in final gather you have a low number in the samples slot.
If you have the imperfections you see in the image below, after you have increased the number of samples try to add a bigger number in theFinal Gather Radius slot.
3DTotal
Advertisement - We need your support!
As
well as you tutorial hungry people eating through a terabit of bandwidth each
month we also have many additional staff and running costs involved in creating
these free pages. We want to continue bringing you many free tutorials and resources
everyday, so PLEASE check out our products and amazon affiliate schemes via the
above banners. Many thanks!
- How to have very fast test renders : Make the render size small (example: 100x75 pixels). It will be for sure too small to see any details, but you can clearly see if the illumination of the room is too dark or too bright.
Ps: Remember that this tutorial teaches a technique of illumination, not what values to put in the light parameter slots. Since the final result of the renders depend on the size of the room, the intensity, the colour, the size and the location of the lights, you must do as many test renders and experiments to get the correct values as you feel is nessessary.
I hope this tutorial was useful for you :)....Best regards
