Interior Lighting Balance for Realistic and Visually Compelling 3D Scene Renderings

Welcome back. Now I think this is looking really good. We may need to go back and forth and adjust some lighting later,  but now we have everything kind of here working together nicely.

We have the exterior lighting. We have the interior lights. Depending on your scene, you may need to add more or fewer lights depending on like what time of day you have and the sun outdoors.

But I hope this video gets you started on adding lights. It's one of the more challenging aspects of creating a scene,  but one that makes a huge difference. We can again check the difference.

If you click on the light and we want to increase the intensity,  you can see that it's creating this warm light and it's increasing the shadows, all kinds of stuff. So there are some adjustments that we want to make. Maybe we do want to go in into this, you know,  you know, thousand range and maybe our temperature wants to be kind of in the,000, right? Turn off the lights.

The difference between the lights on and lights off. It's a big difference to our scene. We're even eliminating some of these seniors,  but I also do feel that it might be a little bit darker kind of in the kitchen and around.

We can quickly look through our scenes just to see how they all kind of fit together with lights. Like, you know, here I'm like, oh, this might be a little bit dark. I may need to add in another light fixture over here, right? Or look in this kitchen.

Oh, I feel a little bit dark over here. I may need to add something else above that. So those are kind of the things that we want to kind of take note of.

And as we kind of add in some other additional lights,  let's think about some additional lights I may want to add, right? We can add in some omnidirectional lights. So omnidirectional lights. If I go into my library and my lights,  I can see that I have this omnidirectional light is the first.

It's almost like a globe light. So it spreads evenly across all directions. If I want to drag this light down onto the floor right here,  you can see that it's reflecting off of this thing.

So it's like a circle. And the closer I am to the floor, it will create these hot spots. The closer I am to the ceiling, it'll create hot spots as well, right? So I want to find this kind of right balance in the middle where it's going to help me illuminate the space evenly.

That feels a little dark. And you know, I want to set these intensities pretty high,  almost in like the 2500 to,000 range. I'm going to type in 2500.

You kind of can see that I already created kind of this general light spread without any crazy hot spots. The attenuation, this is how far it'll spread out, right? Is it going to be this really kind of tiny kind of block element or is it spread out? I want a lot of light going so I can even put it in kind of 70 feet. So just evenly spreads it out around.

And then I want to enable my shadows. This will create a little bit more depth on these things. I hope that my radius will kind of increase the size of this light.

So that way that will soften shadows. I do want to go all the way down and turn my reflections all the way down. I do not want to see that light source reflecting.

So I'm going to go back to my interior view one. I want to turn on and off this omnidirectional light. You can see that it casts a nice glow in here,  but it did kind of create a little bit more kind of brightness above that.

I may want to slide this down a tad or turn down my attenuation to kind of see where this kind of fits or even my intensity. All that kind of balances so it doesn't look too bad. I think that overall that looks pretty good.

If I go back to my kitchen scene before and after,  it definitely helps brighten up that space. If I want to add another one of these light fixtures inside here,  maybe I want to add some more shadows to that. I can do that as well.

Like I'll drag in this light kind of right here in the middle. And I'll kind of pull it up. And then I will increase my intensity.

I want to turn my shadows on first so I can see kind of what it's doing. Radius up higher, more softer shadows. Increasing my intensity to see what this is doing and overall the space and then my attenuation can go up high as well.

So yeah, that is kind of helping also. Some increased kind of shadows and lighting in that space. It definitely helps.

My color balance could be adjusted as well as needed. The last kind of thing is maybe in this corridor,  it may need some additional light sources over here. It feels a little bit dark.

So I could also add a omnidirectional light kind of inside here. The problem with a tight corridor,  you may get some hot spots along the walls and things like that. But overall, I think that creates a nice kind of space.

I want to turn all my shadows in here so it creates a little bit more kind of depth in that area. And turn my reflection off. I don't want it reflecting off of the ground.

Just to kind of brighten that space up a bit. So yeah, I'm really happy with how all these lights are working out. I'll turn these lights on and off just so you can kind of see.

And what I see and what I notice is some of the shadows and depth that's happening in this space. The darker these lights can want to go,  the more shadows you may have. You kind of can see the darker it goes,  the more shadows it'll have.

But again, you also want to kind of balance it out with some of your camera settings. Your camera settings also has the exposure. So you can also bring down the exposure and maybe bring up your light sources.

Kind of find this nice balance between, you know,  the lighting just working with all these aspects together. I'm going to sync this again so that was updated. And I'm going to look at this scene here.

That looks a lot better. And this scene here, this looks really nice. And then I will go back here and I'm like,  okay, one other area that I see is maybe this corner needs something, right? It feels a little bit dark in that corner.

If I was designing a house,  I would realize like, yeah,  that's a little bit dark in that corner. There's no light in the over here. So I may want to just add in a actual light fixture or lamp of sorts.

So I'm going to my objects. I'm going home. If I go in the living room,  I think living room has some lamps.

Here's some lamps. So yeah, there's some general kind of,  you know, hey, this tripod lamp looks good. I'll drag this onto here.

So I put this little tripod lamp on the side,  kind of put it right around there. It did add it into my lights folder. So I can just drag that into my furniture.

I'm going to look at materials. I don't like this black. So I would select this and I can actually modify the color of this.

Maybe I want this more of like kind of a white kind of color. And then I look inside,  I see that there is a light bulb. I want to make this light bulb shine.

So I will add an emissive material. Enter neons, click neons, hold down neon 01,  drag it over and increase my glow. All right.

Now I want to add in a light source for this. It's a general kind of light that's casting light in all directions. So possibly like an omni-directional light might be a good source for this.

So I'll drag this and I'll just put it like right inside there. And right away,  I can see that it is creating a lot of glow right inside of this thing. I can increase my intensity and I can bring down my attenuation so it's a little bit tighter.

And one thing, as soon as I turn on my shadows,  you will see that it's starting to cast some shadows within this. I may not want to do that. So I might want to pull this up a little bit higher,  find something where it's maybe it's not casting some crazy shadows.

Maybe the attenuation needs to be a little bit brighter. Something like that,  where you can kind of see some glow here and some glow up top. All right, I'll increase this a lot so I can really see what's happening.

It's kind of just generally,  just like kind of right around there. Just like that. And then I can bring down my intensity so that way there's a little bit of a light.

Now if I go back to this scene,  I can see that there needs to be some light up here. So that now I can adjust my intensity here just to kind of see what that is going to do to this space. It may need to move more towards the back so I can actually select the light,  hold down control,  select this lamp both together and I can move them independently together.

Kind of put them more in this kind of corner. Now that feels a little bit brighter in this corner over here. I think overall this looks nice.

I'm going to pan through each of these scenes. One, two, and three. And those three scenes are looking pretty good.

I do see that there is kind of a glow here so I'm wondering what that is. That could be from one of those omnidirectional lights that I put in. I can click, I want to make sure that I have these,  make sure that the reflections are all the way off.

Like here, I want that one was on. This one here is off. This one here is on.

So pull that one back. So make sure that there's none of those reflections that are showing. And this right here is,  it looks like it's reflecting a light source of some sort.

Actually, I turned that off and now I'm just kind of like looking around to see, okay, what's going on? What's that reflecting? It looks like it's maybe reflecting the wall back there. Oh, it's reflecting maybe some sun off of that. So that may be from the glass.

And so what I can do if I don't like that is click this glass and maybe I can reduce the opacity of this. So it's maybe a little bit softer, not so harsh. Yeah, because if I did increase that,  you can see that it's going to be this really reflective piece.

All right, well, this kind of does it for the lighting discussion. In the next video, next lessons,  we're going to really just add in some details,  finalize these renderings,  finalize some of the different added details we want to add and really just create our scene. We will do maybe do some minor material adjustments at the very end to get it to kind of feel the way that we like and we'll export it and maybe throw in some kind of different post-process textings that we want to do.

I will see you in the next video.