OTOY Forums

I'm having problems taking my renders to the next level. I think it may be my lighting or it may just be that i'm doing everything wrong.
Any help would be greatly recieved.
Thanks
David

https://imgur.com/a/uNlNAsj

Nice work!

On first glance, it looks like you're way over-illuminating your interior. Even on bright, sunny day with the light streaming in the sliding glass doors, there would not be that much light in an interior space if the visible exterior was even close to properly exposed. With the interior that exposed using normal lights, pretty much everything outside would be completely blown out. I suspect you probably intuitively know this from experience and can tell it looks funny, but can't put your finger on it.

To my eye, your interior lights are using several thousand watts of traditional incandescent power. These are the kinds of lights you use on a film set, not in a home interior. Interior fixtures usually use 1/10 that much go juice.

I suggest you first set up your baseline interior lighting with no Sun or any other exterior illumination at all. Next, turn off all your interior lights and set up your Sun. Then you can turn on both and adjust your camera exposure to capture a more realistic overall image exposure. Most of the time in real life, our eyes and our cameras just can't see such extreme differences in illumination at once.

Nice job! cool textures and the materials are good enough the achieve a good result. modestly, the only issue that I can see is the light. there are too many bright lights coming from ''I don't know''.
I guess you should focus on the type of the light you would achieve, it is Day or night. Morning of midday? you should give importance to the principal light... if it is the sun,
and it is morning, so the greater light should come from there (doors and windows. then you start adding some indoor light to balance the scene and clear the dark areas. please see some references and copy them.

It's a good start. Too much ambient / even light. Textures could use some work. Watch the texture scale / tile repeats. More reflections. The wide-angle camera doesn't help. Good Luck!

Hi, my guess is too many GI bounces. I had a similar learning experience, thinking more bounces = more realism. But the render was just lacking contrast and soft shadows. Dialing back the number of bounces fixed it, start with 3 see how it looks, maybe go to 4/5? Don't think you will need more than that.

Good luck