Explore the nuances of lighting and environmental settings in interior design rendering. Learn about the role of sunlight, skylight, and mood in creating dramatic scenes and discover the advantages of using global illumination settings and Lumen for high-quality, accurate renders.
Key Insights:
- Environmental settings, including sunlight and skylight entering through windows, play a significant role in creating the mood and atmosphere of an interior scene. This can make a scene feel bright and open or intimate and dramatic.
- Rendering techniques such as Lumen, specific to Epic Games' Unreal Engine, are recommended for interior scenes due to their balance of speed and quality. Lumen is particularly effective in creating detailed reflections, textures, and shadows in interior renderings.
- Global illumination settings, exterior environment elements, and interior lighting should be used in combination to bring a scene to life. These elements require careful balancing and may require a lot of back-and-forth adjustments to achieve the desired result.
This lesson is a preview from our Revit & Twinmotion Interior Rendering Course Online (includes software) and Interior Design Professional Course Online (includes software & exam). Enroll in a course for detailed lessons, live instructor support, and project-based training.
Alright, now that we have our interior view set up, let's focus on the environmental settings. I want to close down this library, turn this off so we have more space to real view, and then I want to drag this over so I can actually get more access to these settings that I'm going to be adjusting.
Now that we have our interior view set up, let's focus on the environmental settings that define the base lighting of the scene. So even though we're indoors, the outdoor environment still plays a huge role because of the sunlight and the skylight that can enter through the window, and it can interact with interior surfaces and shadows, reflections. Let's think about mood.
Do you want the scene to feel bright and open or intimate and dramatic? The mood of the scene drives the choices in both camera angle and lighting. For example, a bright airy kitchen might be shot wide with lots of natural light, while a moody lounge might use tighter framing and softer artificial lighting. So there are a few options that we need to explore.
Let's look into the render settings here. Earlier in the course, we discussed Path Tracer and Real Time, and then Real Time had Standard and Lumen. I essentially recommended Lumen for interior scenes as it's a lot quicker and looks great.
It's a great balance of that speed and quality that we want to get, and plus when we're creating these interior renderings and some of this computer processing power, I don't want to overdo it with Path Tracer. I felt that Lumen is actually a new setting, and that's specific to Epic Games' Unreal Engine. Their Unreal Engine uses Lumen, and it's high quality and accurate, and it's amazing.
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So I highly recommend using Lumen within Twinmotion. If you select Real Time and then Lumen, this is now where we'll get to our settings on our design. You can instantly see that this changed space here.
I actually want to go over to this view here and use this as my practice ground instead of here. I will be copying over my settings over to those later. So let's go back to here and click going back into click our interior view, then click on Render Settings here, Real Time, and then Lumen.
So to bring the scene to life, we need to use a combination of global illumination settings, you know such as the exposure, scene detail, plus the exterior environment, sky, clouds, etc., shadows, and interior lighting. We need to use those combinations, and there is some magic combination for all three of those. There will be lots of back and forth.
I'm going to walk you through what I think is the best approach, how to go about it, and we will create our interior scenes. You can already see how nicely just this setting looks. You can see some flashing kind of in the back.
We'll address some of that, but overall, like the reflectivity, the general lighting, it all feels so much better than just the standard illumination. This seems really flat, and here we're starting to get some definition in some of these corners and the ceilings. Now if we go to the right, we'll see categories.
I'm going to close these down so we can quickly see these three main categories. We have global illumination, lumen reflection settings, and shadows. We're going to walk through each of these settings and how they can affect the interior.
Let's open up global illumination and let's click scene detail. This basically determines how much effort lumen is going to do on the objects for its reflections, textures, shadows, etc. I like to maximize this to four.
The higher the number does increase your RAM usage. If you are having trouble rendering without the program crashing, you may want to drop this down to two and try that out. Next we got view distance.
This determines how far away lumen will be rendering from the scene. I like to stick a little bit larger to kind of around 1,000 feet. Next we got lighting update speed.
This is the speed in which lumen will update. I'm going to set this to a little bit higher to 1.4. I want to check the lumen SSGI, which is the global illumination, and now I'm going to jump over into the lumen reflection settings. Here we have two options.
We can do optimized or full. Optimized actually uses cache data and kind of bakes it into the scene versus full uses real-time data. In my opinion, optimized is faster and uses less computing power and the quality is nearly identical.
So I'm going to click optimized. You can notice that it didn't even change anything and here I want to set my quality to 10. Increases the overall quality but again it would increase your processing power.
If your computer is having trouble, I would bring that down to two or three. And then bounce count. This is where this is basically how many times a light source is bouncing off of the surface reflecting.
Is it going to boing, boing, boing, boing, boing, boing, reflecting all the surfaces, right? Higher the number, more accurate, but also more intense on your computer. I want to bump this up to eight. Next is shadows.
I'm going to open up shadows. So here we have standard versus accurate. For me, I prefer accurate settings.
You can kind of can see already some of this kind of shadows happening on the back side over here. I like accurate and I want my sun bias to kind of be in 55 and then my light basis in at 50. So this is essentially just the general kind of settings for your render settings with Lumen.
If you were to be using path tracer, there will be an entirely different type of settings for this. I'm going to quickly go through that just so that way you have a good understanding of all the tools. Prior to doing that, I'm going to sync this and then make a duplicate so I can kind of show you what that looks like.
Keep in mind, if you were to once do a click path tracer, your computer is going to be rendering this scene. So it may lock you down and crash. I'm going to save just in case something happens.
It's always good to save as we go or set up auto save throughout. So once I click path tracer, you can see that my settings automatically change. So all of a sudden I have low, medium and high.
And then I just have this max balances and different settings. You can see that already the general lighting of the space looks good without doing anything. So overall, it's a really quick tool to render nicely.
You can nice glow shadows or things of that nature. However, it takes a lot longer to render. I want to show you how to do this within Lumen.
So I'm going to go back to here. I'm going to delete this view and then we'll continue working on this scene. So that's kind of everything for the render settings and global illumination settings for Lumen.
In the next video, we are going to jump into the environmental settings, which is the sky, clouds, sun, shadows, all that. I will see you in the next video.
