Scene Composition and Lighting Adjustments for Polished and Balanced Architectural Renders

Let me close out some of these elements here and minimize this library so I can really get a good focus on this image. So with all the details in place, it's time to really fine-tune the presentation.

So let's first revisit our camera framing. So let's go to our view here,  let's go to our camera. I do feel like I need to rotate this a bit more over here just so I can see a little bit more of what's happening on this side of the of the model.

Something's just kind of right like that. I feel like that's feeling a little bit better. I'll refresh that.

Go back to this scene here. Now that I have this, these objects in here, I feel like this is, this is looking pretty good in this view. Refresh that.

And then here, this kitchen we're having to bump up a little bit taller. Maybe I need to go kind of look this direction a bit more like that. I feel like this is pretty good.

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We want to check every saved camera angle for the balance composition. You know, this is make, this is where we want to make sure that our focal points are clear and the eye is guided naturally throughout the scene. The next thing we want to do is adjust some of the overall lighting and making sure everything is working together harmoniously.

We want to look for areas like in the crown molding and the baseboard, making sure that there's some nice kind of shadows on the base of it that it's really kind of framing on the ground nicely. If you feel that this ground is maybe a little bit too reflective, you can bring that back. The more, the less reflective, the more kind of shadows you will kind of have from that base.

So you can kind of play around with what that looks like within there. The other thing to think about is if you're not happy with how your shadows are playing underneath your objects, you can actually place them manually. So under my 3D assets that I have highlighted, if I go over and click library and then go all the way over to objects, decals, and scroll all the way down to the bottom,  you'll see a series of shadows.

So all the way down in the very bottom, there's going to be a circle shadow and a square shadow. These are elements that you want to kind of manually create these shadows. You want to bump that up.

So you can actually do that and say you want to adjust the scale and make this feel a bit more rectilinear. You can actually adjust the size of this by the depth and the size. So I will position this kind of more in the so we can kind of see this.

So you can kind of see here the depth really kind of changes more of the kind of oval type shape. Under details, I can do length and width. So kind of get more of this oval shape.

Kind of put that underneath here. I think maybe the size needs to be a little bit smaller. And then depth is what's going to be kind of your kind of spread or how high or how far it will cast shadows.

Then your opacity, right? So I don't want this to be too dark. Go back to this view here. I want to click this shadow.

I want to adjust the opacity just a little bit more just to pump up some shadows underneath that object. I can CTRL C, CTRL V, copy and paste a copy of it this time underneath the chair. Maybe I rotate this 90 degrees so that way it's kind of in this direction.

I can adjust the length and width but something to give it some punch underneath those. If you need to add in additional kind of shadows, like for example maybe you want some more shadows underneath this credenza piece, you can put this kind of in the middle here. We can adjust the width to be a little bit longer.

Something like that. Move that underneath it. Now there's a little bit more shadow.

So there's certain like little tricks to help give you a little more realistic shadows and materiality through this space if your lighting isn't really doing that great of a job. The other thing that I like to do is I like to go through a series of progressions where I look at you know the camera adjustment, the position, make sure all the assets look good and well balanced. What I just did.

I want to look at the camera exposure. You know go up and down. I want to look at the lights.

Look at the lights again. See if I need to raise them, lower them, adjust any materials and adjust some of the contrast, saturation and sharpness of the overall image. If I click this view and I go over to camera and see this is around my exposure.

The higher this brightness, the brighter it is, but the more washed out some of these elements are. Kind of want to find this balance where I bring it down a little bit kind of lower, kind of almost close to the one, the one range and then I bump up my lights a little bit higher as needed to kind of give it that more of a kind of a punch in that space. So you're kind of working yourself kind of around this kind of back and forth balance between those.

So I think this looks pretty good with my shadows. I can adjust my lighting. So I already adjusted this light.

Let's go adjust this little light here. I feel like that's a little bit too overexposed. Let's find this omni-directional light.

Let's bring this bring the exposure down for that a little bit lower. Something like that. Then the other thing to look at is materiality.

I feel like this couch maybe needs a little bit more reflectivity on it. Maybe you feel a little bit shinier and glossier. Maybe it wants to modify the color a bit more.

Maybe it wants to be a little more kind of reddish or bolder, darker,  things like that. Just kind of give it a good balance of kind of color into the space. This wood here may want to be a little bit lighter of a wood.

Maybe we want to use this wood instead so it all kind of matches together. Things like that that really kind of balance out the scene. You know I'm still not quite happy with this leather.

I can bump the luminosity. Maybe I get this a little more on the kind of the redder side. Like that.

I feel like that's looking you know pretty good. Now I'm likewise I'm seeing this that probably needs to get modified as well. Maybe punch up the saturation a bit on that.

It kind of feels like they're working together. I can go back to their scene to see if it looks good on those as well. I really like that.

So yeah that's kind of what I would like to do as I go back and forth. The other option is under effects. This is where I will have things like contrast, saturation,  clay rendering, different filter options.

So here you know I may want to add a bit more contrast to this image. Maybe I'll punch up some of the colors. Maybe I go up to like 52.

And saturation I want to bolster some of the colors just a little bit. I can obviously I can do this in post or I can do this within here. So kind of this 52 to 51 range.

Keep in mind that once you do this one time it does not apply to each of these scenes. You can copy all the ambience across but because each scene is a little bit different. I'm just going to treat them more independently like this.

So again in this scene here I'm going to go to my camera. I'm going to adjust my exposure. Bring my exposure down a little bit.

Find it out. I already adjusted my lighting in the previous one. So I'm not going to touch my light.

Now I'm just going to try to find a nice balance for my camera. My white balance making sure that all that is kind of looking good per scene is really nice. And I'll do the final one in this kitchen.

Maybe I want this to be a little bit brighter in the kitchen. Maybe I want this to be a little bit a little cooler. Colors look nice.

So like overall like I'm really happy with these renderings of how they're turning out. The final step is going to be exporting them and maybe doing some minor post processing work to really add in some additional kind of detail and flavor for it. So I will see you in the next video as we finalize these renderings.