OTOY Forums

Hi everyone !


I've been working on this project for some time now.
I'm really struggling with lighting this room and making it realistic.

I tried lots of things :
- PMC
- Directlighting
- Mixing Directlighting "white environment" and "sunlight environment" in Photoshop... (picture below made only with sunlight)
- balancing and re-balancing the lights
- using portals and/or white emitting planes to let more light in

And still it won't come out "natural" nor realistic...

Unfortunately I can't change the point of view, as the customer absolutely wants the entire room to be visible AND from that angle.

Any tips and/or ideas would help me greatly, many thanks in advance...


(please ignore the 2 "weird upright grey things" on the table, it was just a test)

Have you played around with sun position / angle, to get different shadows length / angle?

Something strange going on.... it seems like the room is for dwarfs, so maybe there's DOF going on or something is out of scale.

Is there only natural light on this set?

I think that the artificial lights a bit too powerfull to over fill the room while you also have sun lighting inside.
Sun light usually overcomes the artificial lights.
And the materials of the plant tree at the back is kind of gives the CGI render feel.
I would suggest after you tweak to a more natural light environment Play with curves in image editing software.
And always, a very subtle lens flare helps.
Hope it helps

As ozgubir says.. Tone down the interior lights. They cast unatural light to the ceiling right now. The sun direction is what confuses me the most.. It reaches up onto the sideboard almost like the sun it coming from a very low angle (like sundown/sunrise) but with the light temperature of broad daylight.

I would reposition the sun, so it doesnt reach as far into the room as it does now. Use .ies profiles on the roof spotlights etc. And maybe make one image that is "full daylight, no interior light" and one "evening (no/little exterior light, and mostly interior light)" and se how that turns out.

/Regards Peter K

is it a Max scene?

you haven't big apertures then you haven't enough light

put a big bank in front of the scene...not orthogonal.

balance the light with two banks, one on the left and one on the right, warm and cold

tweak the sunlight to not overexpose

put an invisible white bank on the ceiling facing the table

Calibrate all the lights.

photoshop it wit Nik Viveza.

Hi everyone,

Many thanks for your kind and helpful replies.


Below are some images - DirectLighting only. (tried with PMC but made very little difference, especially with the "artifical lights only" settings)

@ matej & oguzbir : I changed the sun angle, so it is full daylight now (month = 6 / hour = 12.5)

@ remon_v : it seems indeed that the table is veeery large, but I checked the scales for all the objects, and they're fine. Maybe the floor tiles are too big compared with the "mortar gap" between them (the original texture is for 30cm x 30cm tiles. I had to double the size of the texture so it corresponds to 60cm x 60cm tiles )

@ manalokos : indeed there's a few artificial lights in this scene

@ PeterCGS : below are 3 DirectLighting shots : "daylight only" / "artificial lights only" / "artificial lights with higher exposure". I'm surprised that lights don't light up the scene very well compared with real life... Probably because my lampshades are not SSS but completely opaque, hence producing a spotlight effect...?

@ Gabrielefx : it's a Blender scene.
- When you say "bank" you mean a plane with the normal pointing towards the scene, is that right ?
- The bank on the left would be warmer to enhance the sun light, and the colder one on the right to enhance artificial lighting => do I understand well ?
- Would you tweak the sunlight before or after the artificial lights ? What I tend to do is first assign the wattage of each lamp in the "power" setting (say, "100" for 100 watts) , and then tweak the sunlight.

Many thanks to you all guys, your help is much appreciated

turn the artificial light of and use PMC...
the artificial lighting is spoiling your image, and it should have much lower intensity anyway unless you were using 1000W lamps everywhere... Direct lighting will give you a blue tint everywhere...

If you want to use artificial light, first, there should be some kind of translucency on the abajour of the main lamp.
You should plan to illuminate the walls to provide indirect light and not the floor, with the other sources.

I see that your Gamma is set to 1.0 in the artificial image.. This makes a very "contrasty scene". If you bump up the gamma for your interior light you'll see that you'll get a much nicer light fallow, since it doesn't crush the contrast as much (the same goes for the rest of the images)

Are you using .ies profiles for the artificial light? The light hitting the roof makes no sense. And if you would use .ies profiles, you can rotate the light correctly. Now there is more light hitting the roof than the table. Since in reality the fixture of the light would block the light, it would be so bright as it is now.

In the "sunlight" image, I wonder why there are still sunlight hitting the sideboard? It looks very odd.


Do you have anything behind the camera? It seems there is nothing to bounce of light from. So the normals facing us are getting more dark than others.

/Regards Peter K * CGS