Help on lighting

[Dreamdtt2000]

Hey guys, i'm a noobie here and I need some help. I made a room and I'm trying to make it look realistic. But I can't seem to get out the realistic look. I want people to look at my work and think it's a photo. Anyone can help me on my lighting? I think my modeling is fine but I'm still working on my texturing. What makes this look so fake? I am not good with lighting. I was wondering what people usually use to light their scene. Is it with just omni lights and target spots? I do not have any plugins, so can anyone give me any pointers to how to light a room without the plugins? Here is pics of the room I made and the lights I used. I just used target spot lights and omni lights and changed the mulitplier. I saw someone at my school do realistic lighting without the plugins. He did something with the lights to make it look like the walls are real. Something about the photons ect. He told me he used only target spots. If anyone can help..... I appreciate it ALOT thanks. I know my lighting sucks because it takes 3 seconds to render. I see alot of people take 30mins to render a frame.

[Dreamdtt2000]

I used 3dmax 7.

[Turboracer]

I don't know much about lighting interior scenes, but I know there are quite a few tutorials hanging around, such as this page full of lighting and rendering tutorials for 3dstudio max .

http://67.15.36.49/ffa/tutorials/tutorialsmax_rend.asp

I will tell you what I know for myself though. A skylight would be good to have, seeing as you have ambient light coming in from outside, make sure it's a bit of a blue color. The reasoning behind it being blue(I believe knowing why something does something is rather important) is because of the sunlight bouncing around on air particles, also the reason the sky is blue. A main light, a direct light, with a bit of a yellow color to it to simulate sunlight, make sure you set the shadows to raytrace instead of shadow map(probably would be a good idea to create a mental ray area spot(or omni) and then change the light to a direct light, that way the shadows aren't so harsh). Omnis should only be used inside if you're trying to brighten up the interior a bit, or if you're trying to make them represent a light that is on inside of the house. Now, some of my techniques might not work well, especially if you haven't set mental ray as the renderer. Setting the renderer to mental ray is very easy if you don't know how, only bring up the render settings box, and scroll to the very bottom of common page of it, click assign render, then click box with the ... inside of it next to the production slot. Then click mental ray renderer and click ok.

After this point is many many many test renders to figure out how to set up a render. In time, you'll pretty much know what your scene is going to look like in a render, before you set anything up, it's all about practice. It's pretty simple to set up mental ray, and once you learn how to use it, it renders images rather fast. Go to the indirect illumination page of the render window, scroll to the bottom where it says final gather. Check the enable box, and then a few settings are changeable. In samples, I generally use a setting around 50 for test renders. I have learned another way to help attempt to optimize the render a bit is to fiddle around with the radius and min. radius settings. Pretty much the radius one is set to 10x the min radius number. There's also the trace depth section lower down which can help with speed and quality. Using falloff can brighten an interior scene, or at least, it did for me when I tested with it once.

Once you have it set up, it'll be quite dark at the render, this is where you turn on exposure control, which is in the environment window.

One of the best learning tools for render is just fiddling around with settings, till you find something you like. When you get to those times when it takes forever for one block of an extremely simple scene, then you need to stop, probably reset all the render settings, and read another tutorial.

[Dreamdtt2000]

Thanks man, I actually tried looking into the tutorials here but, it seems like they have a different version of max because I couldn't follow along. Your modeling skillz is amazing man. What lights do you use to render your characters? Also do you have any pointers for me in modeling? Anything I can do to improve? Thanks.

[lone deranger]

i suggest you get your hands on a copy of vray. very quick and simple to set up decent lighting solutions

[Dreamdtt2000]

Where and how much?

[lone deranger]

http://vrayinfo.vismasters.com/catal...gory_path=1_55

currently, its absolutely the best for 3dsmax

[Dreamdtt2000]

Thanks, I think I want to know the basics in lighting for max and than I will get that software. I see some people that just work in max and there lighting is still realistic. Imma try that first and get the vray later. Thanks again. That software is expensive.

[RockstarKate]

You can definitely do somethings in max with just the scanline render and get some nice results without huge render times.
First, you have to think about what type of shadows would really be in this room. They would be soft shadows because of the light bouncing around. (they wouldn't have hard edges) Remember that you can exclude certain objects in your scene from being affected by certain lights. So you may need to make lights specifically to cast the kind of shadows you want. and exclude the other objects.
Also, since you're working with sunlight, you need to use a direct light instead of a spot for your sun. A spot light casts shadows in perspective (like a light bulb) while a direct light casts shadows in parallel like the sun. (If you don't know what I mean, set up a simple scene with a cylinder on a plane and try out a spot versus a direct to see the difference.
You may want to try some volume light with the sun to get that glowy effect.
Never underestimate Max's help files. It can be really really useful.
I also think you're going to have to work on your materials a bit. The table is too reflective and the floor isn't reflective enough. The doors should probably be a bit reflective as well. But don't go crazy. A small refection can make a really big difference.
You're modelling looks okay, if very simple, but I'd fix the couch if I were you. It looks much too sharp on the edges. The rug looks good. I'm not sure what the dark edge around the floor under the tv and toward the fromt of the pic is supposed to be.
One more thing: You are missing a very important element here: a camera! It is very hard to do good lighting if you haven't already chosen your camera angle. In my classes, we always make a camera first before we ever make lights.
I hope that helps and maybe I'll try to do a little tutorial for you later if you try some stuff and have more questions. Remember. Lighting is 10% set-up and 90% tweaking.

[Dreamdtt2000]

Thanks. I like your work. I actually tried to make the ground and windows reflective but for some reason it doesn't reflect. This was a environment I quickly put together just to see if I can do realistic lighting. In your 3d gallery.... For the outside lighting what did you use?

[RockstarKate]

Thanks!
I used just regular lights. Omnis, spots, and directs in the sunny one. Nothing too tricky, but there are about 12 lights in each scene. Oh, there's a glow effect on the lanterns and volume fog in the night one. But it's all just scanline renders.
Keep playing, reading tutorials and asking questions. You'll figure it out