Living room HELP!!!!

[clausgs]

Hi Claus

There's no "best way", just the way to convey the look and feel you want to achieve.

To start with, the difference between human eye and a camera should be understood.
Our eyes perpetually adapt to light intensity, which is why we have a clear view of our surroundings.

A camera don't do this which mean that pas a certain level of light some areas will be "burnt" and under another level so dark that it will be hard to distinguish anything.

Typically, in photography (interiors), if you set your camera aperture and stop to catch direct sunlight without burn the rest of the room will appear dark. If you set the exposure high enough to have some bright corners then the areas under direct sun light will be burnt. High end lenses, special films, etc...improve things a bit but you can't totally avoid this.

This is why interiors shots are generally done using two techniques: making a shot set on daylight (so the room will be under exposed), another one set on the interior light level (the windows will then appear totally "burnt") and then mix the two shots in post processing.

The other technique is too shot at dusk or dawn so that the sun rays are not to intense.

In 3D this technique can be used but there are other tricks that photographs can't use...

One is to set a strong Sky light and to lower the Sun strength, but it can't be done in Octane as they are physically correct and therefore linked together.

Another one is to place a light plane like you did + Sun light so that you can push the light strength higher than the physical Sky.

Both of these methods helps but all the light will come from the same source (in this case the window).

Another way of doing it is to simply hide / delete the walls that are not in your camera sight, letting more Skylight entering the space, but in that case you must pay attention to unwanted reflections.

And then of course you can turn on the indoor lights.

If you add just a light plane like you did it is a good trick to give it a warm color to balance the Sun light (cold, blueish color) and to set it at a low value, if your rendering give the feeling that the strongest light source is not the Sun it will look very artificial.

And of course there is the post processing as mentioned earlier.

As Matty said I don't think your renders are dark, actually they are pretty close to how a photo would look without post processing.

Once again, it's all about the mood you want to achieve.

Hi Leiurus

Thanks a million for a great explanation of how this works, I must say you seams to know this topic very well.

I have tried different ways of render and it seams non is 100%. But you comment on mixing 2 pic together i PS is a great idea. I read about it before but never tried. Just now I tried to mix 2 pic and the result is good as you get the good parts from both. I just tried with some of my earlier renders of the same scene so not 100% perfect.

You say one pic that is dark, i guess you mean that I render the scene with only sun light trough the window, right? (very bright window, but inside dark)
The other pic, I render with only the light surfaces inside the room. The room will have the correct light level but no sun coming from the window, right?

So can you maybe show me 2 pic of what you would merge together to get a perfect final render.?
And how much is the mix blend in PS you use??

Hope you can help,,, I really learn a lot from your post,,, thanks in advance..

Thanks, Claus

[Leiurus]

Mixing 2 renders is one way to do it but IMHO it is the longest (it doubles the renders and add post processing time), 3D work allows to use tricks like deleting walls, etc...

Because Octane is unbiased it actually makes some parts of the work harder and also things like not being able to use HDRI environment and Sun light at the same time are kinda of a pain in the back but there are always some ways to work around it.

For example you could render one view with the right direct Sun light then in Photoshop duplicate the layers, play with levels and exposure and then delete the over bright spots. You could add some invisible lights in the scene, you could open some wall to let more Sky light enter the room, etc...There are millions of possibilities, it's all about how you like to work and what you want to achieve.

Look at this making of, the workflow is quite interesting:

http://www.ronenbekerman.com/making-urb ... co-cerica/

There's no magic tricks, it's all about trial and errors and quality at each level of the rendering: modelling, texturing and lighting

Octane is a fantastic engine but because it's fast and unbiased does not mean it's a shortcut for learning and experimenting. It is a great tool, but a tool it is. Look at what Bertrand Benoit, an amazing 3D professional, produced with Octane even though he barely works with it and has a very weak hardware when it comes to GPU computing. He has been able to create these amazing renders because he already knew how to compose a striking image, learning Octane was just a detail.

Cheers

[MaTtY631990]

One aspect that might help in reducing noise is to use a light portal which is a simple polygon plane placed just slightly behind the window with the normal facing into the scene. This communicates with the engine to instruct where the light is entering the room, and as an end result this gives less render time, as well less samples needed. It does not work so well with sunlight, h and I believe this is due the strong contrast of light, however increasing sunsize might help because it will work better with softer light.