Interior Lighting - Large Areas
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How do you lot light large office buildings?
I got a project with a large inner yard with glass walls so you see into all the floors in the building. How do you light the interior? Lots of small lights? large area lights? Other methods?
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I once did a mall interior where you could see several floor at the same time.
First I tried with several hundreds of spot and omni lights but that turned rendering into a crawl so I ended up having a large area light in a shape that covered almost the entire floor on each floor instead.One could also use a black and white mask to get the area light to resemble smaller lights.
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Try creating a emissive material bitmap. Layout the lights on the bitmap the way you would have them on the ceiling. I think this would work for general lighting and would cut down on the number of lights you have to place in the model.
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@sketchyjon said:
Try creating a emissive material bitmap. Layout the lights on the bitmap the way you would have them on the ceiling. I think this would work for general lighting and would cut down on the number of lights you have to place in the model.
What render engines have you tried this with?
In V-Ray emissive materials are very poor for actual lighting - they are there merely for the visual effect.
Currently I'm toying with 3ds max and Mental Ray - not sure how emmisive materials works there in terms of efficiency.
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I did testing some time ago - I can't remember if it was here or on the chaosgroup forum I posted. Anyhow - emmissive works just fine as long as you have another source for GI, and I've found it cuts down the time by about 1/4 compared to area lights. Here is an example render (and attached skp file)
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and it's probably even faster if you use valerostudio's trick of getting rid of refraction in the glass altogether...
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I am using Vray. You are correct about the quality of lighting. I would only try this with general lighting. I have not tried it myself. Just a theory. I usually render smaller spaces and can use individual lights.
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@andybot said:
emmissive works just fine as long as you have another source for GI
I don't have the need for visually see the lights - just for general illumination of the spaces.
Btw - Damien post some really interesting insight to the performance of different lights in V-Ray:
http://www.chaosgroup.com/forums/vbulletin/showthread.php?58932-What-s-quicker-omni-or-rectangular-lights(Somewhat condensed summary here: http://www.cgpinoy.org/t3371-rectangular-and-omni-lights )
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So what did you decide to do for the lighting? Post a pic.
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Got sidetracked by another project. Undetermined yet.
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