General Interior Lighting Question

[Banti]

I am currently facing the challenge of setting up some interior scenes with characters in them. The problem i have is that making the interior AND the character look both, decently realistic and still well illuminated is bit difficult to say the least. So i do have a few questions regarding interior lighting.

1) Is there a consensus if it is better to use and HDRI or the (new) Octane Daylight for the general "ambient light"? In terms of brightness i need to raise the power of either to something between 15-30 just to have the interior "okay-ish" illuminated. But setting it this higher tends to burn out windows and the floor.

2) Is it a good idea to use small light sources to simulate ceiling lights? Say i use 2 "smaller" emitting spheres on the ceiling. Because i remember reading that small light sources can be quite noise heavy. But what is considered to be small?

3) Maybe someone can share some tipps and tricks about lighting characters indoors while mantaining a somewhat realistic look. I am not talking about photorealism, i just dont want lightsources to come from nowhere in the scene, that about it.


Thanks