Placing and Instancing Interior Recessed Lights for Realistic Architectural Rendering Workflow

Alright, now let's roll up our sleeves and actually place and adjust some interior lights. So as we just finished adding in the emissive materials, let's add some lights for those specific downlights.

So under libraries, click library right here,  and then let's go to lights. All we need to do is find the light that we want,  click it, hold it, and drag it onto our scene. We want to place it where it makes sense in both the design and function.

So for this scene, I want to place lights exactly where I have the current downlights and lights in the lamps. So generally where I have lights. Once all those are placed, we can decide if we need to add any additional kind of general lights to brighten up the scene.

Let's keep in mind again that the settings that will be applied for these lights are going to be different in Lumen than they will be for in Path Tracer. So it's nice to set independent layers perhaps for each type of light. So that way if you do have a combination of Path Tracer, Interior Renderings, and Lumen, you can toggle on and off the light layers for that.

For right now, let's just keep it on our same lights. Let's make sure that we have our correct layer highlighted. We're going to right click the lights, and we want to make this our active container.

Now you can see it's bold. Now whenever we add a light, it will automatically place it within this folder. Alright, now let's add a few different downlights for these recessed cans.

If you look under here, Library, there is a lot of different options on these downlights, right? There are ones that have kind of widespread, some that are against the wall, some that are directly above. You know, there are general spotlights. These give you some of the most range to do things.

If you click this light and drag it in here, I'm going to do a few just so you can kind of see. You can see that there's already kind of a cone angle and an option for that, and there's options for the intensity as well as the attenuation. We're going to jump into more of those settings in the next video, but right now we want to think about which kind of lights we want to put in there.

IES 5 is also very similar to the spotlights. I'm going to drag this on here. You can kind of see the hot spot that's happening underneath.

You know, it's very similar to the spotlight. The cone angle is also really large and small, so you can adjust that. I'm going to go back and forth and toggle between the two.

You can almost see that they're both very similar. So spotlight, I want to bring my intensity up just so I can see it kind of over there. I'm going to bring it up to,000.

I'll bring this IES up to,000 as well. You can see the brightness on this one is a lot brighter than the other. When you look at the spotlight versus the IES,  there are some range.

I prefer the spotlight if I'm going to do this because I can actually get a good kind of range and how I want this to be done. I think it has the most kind of the ease of using it. So I'm just going to be using some spotlights for these recessed cans.

So I'm going to delete the IES 05 and also I'm going to delete the spotlight because I want to add a fresh one in here. So I'm going to click this and drag it onto my scene. Now I want to kind of zoom in.

If I'm zooming in really slow, I can hit 4 to zoom in faster. Click 3 on my keyboard again to move in slow. I want to click and drag this portion here.

This will keep it basically within on the green and red axes only. However, the red will just slide along the red. The green will move it just along the green.

And if I click this little yellow dot, it's going to attach it to like wherever surface I'm at. If I wanted to attach it to here, I can do so. But I kind of want this to be essentially right up onto it.

So, you know, I kind of can do a combination of like looking from the front just to see where this is at and then from underneath to realizing like, OK, I may not be quite dead center into this. You know, your perspective may be weird because we're doing it on parallel projection. So let's do the best that we can kind of in this thing to kind of get it generally kind of right there.

We don't want to get too, too close up to this because it could create some hotspots above. So let's put it slightly below. And the goal is to copy and paste each of these lights over all of these things.

So once we click on a light, you can see that there's many settings to use and adjust for each of these lights. In the next lesson, we will go over those and we will adjust those. For right now, let's just focus on adding all the necessary lights for our scene.

Let's copy these around so we can easily do a control C and control V on our keyboard. If I click control, hold down control and hit C, that's a copy. I can do a control V on my keyboard to paste it.

Instance, this would essentially make a copy of this instance and it will link these two lights together. A copy will have it be independent of it, just an independent copy of that light. We want to have it on instance so that way they'll link together.

And then I can hover over the this little quarter circle in between the green and the red and then drag it over here. Now if I go to my settings and I drag this intensity, I can see that both these lights are linked together, which is nice because so whenever I adjust one light, I will adjust all of them. Again, I will do the same thing.

I can even copy two at the same time knowing that these two hold down control and click the second one. Control C on my keyboard, control V, copy,  instance. Now drag these two over to these lights.

And now I want to do these four over here. In Revit, all these are spaced equally. I can select four of them, control C, control V,  instance, and then I can move these over here.

I may want to zoom in a bit just to see where exactly these are at. Make sure they're placed appropriately. There we go.

And now there are just a few more different lights down here. I'll just do one. I'll do control C, control V,  instance, move this down here and then I will see any other lights that I have.

There's two more lights in the back. Control C, control V, instance, pull it there. Control C, control V, instance,  place it there.

Now let's go over here. Now I see that I have three lights down this hallway,  so I'll do again this one. Control C, control V, instance.

I'll just do control V again and it'll place it right on top of this one. V, and I'll do control V again, instance, and put it down here. Now I have all of these can lights have an independent light, except for these two in the corner that I seem to have missed.

So let's do that again. Let's copy these two. Control C,  control V, instance, and let's move these two right there.

And then let's adjust this one a bit so it's kind of more centered. All right, so now we have all these lights. I can click this interior view here and I can see I have all these lights on.

We can add in another IES light for the floor lamp. We can either use a spotlight or we can use a lamp. I will, for this case, let's use an IES lamp just so we can kind of see what this looks like.

Let's look around. Let's say I want this IES 7, so I'm going to drag this onto here. So you can see here the cone angle is really wide.

I want to just kind of adjust this down just for the sake of working on this. I can adjust that later as needed, but here this is where I want to place it essentially right inside of where this bulb is at. I also might want to adjust the material of this bulb so it's an emissive material as well.

We want to kind of spin around to see exactly where we're at. See this can be inside of this light fixture. Kind of hard to tell exactly where it's at,  but kind of need to move around and see.

If you bump up the intensity, you can kind of can see a bit more of where that's happening. Then I can see that it's at this angle, so I can actually click on this little rotate where it gives me this little gizmo of angle pieces. I want to click this red and maybe I'll just rotate this like 25 degrees.

Maybe I'll go back a little bit. Maybe I'll do 15. Then I can move this and I can see that it's kind of angled appropriately.

I can move it up so it's within this light. That's kind of at that angle where this light is at. I can rotate around here to see if it's in the general location and it is.

So that's kind of what I would do for these lamps and adding in additional lights. You see here that all these lights were placed in the folder. Now let's move into adjusting the specific lighting settings.

We're going to discuss that in the next video, so let's save our file and then I will see you in the next video.