I'm playing around with Karma and lighting. In the following scene I'm using a dome light only which I set to intensity 4. It's pretty close to what I want but too dark in the shadow areas. What is a general lighting setup for outside scenes (this actually is an outdoor scene)? Should I add a distant light or increase the intensity of the dome light? Could you point me to some document or video?
My first mistake was probably that I treated this as an outdoor scene although it is actually an indoor scene. That obviously comes from the fact, that I always see the building from the outside – pictures attached. (This is the Rotunda in Vienna, built 1873 for the world fair, burned down 1937.) Thanks for the input! I’ll try a couple of things and come back with results.
So, this is the first try - acually a pretty simple approach. I placed two sphere lights - one right in front of the camera, the second in the back, with a big radius and low intensity. That already looks a lot better.
@Konstantin: I tried to translate to Houdini what you are doing in the C4D video, but I failed because I don't know how to, for example, create an "Aura". I simply don't know enough about Houdini atm.
Btw: is it only possible to place lights at the highest geo level? I would like to place lights anywhere. If I move a room for example, I’d like the lights to move too. Is there a way to achieve that?
@Konstantin: Inspired by your video I've put area lights right before the windows, a little smaller than the windows, lifted up a bit and with an intensity of 10 (that's probably a bit overdone). But that looks even a bit better than the one before.
@Enivob: I tried that in the very beginning but the problem was, that, if I put the distant light and the dome light in the same direction, the dome light can't really brighten up the shadows because it's blocked by the same objects as the distant light. If I put the dome light at a different angle, then I get sort of two shadows... Did I miss something?
BTw: that's again an example where it would be cool if I could place the lights directly in the wall segments that form the outer walls, so when I copy them that lights are also copied. At the moment I have to place each light individually into the complete model...
So, this is the "more or less final" lighting setup for now. I've created the area lights with an instancer right at the stage. It works but it feels a little weird, because I have to fumble the lights into the final model...
Why dont you just increase the dome light and sun light. If you are exposing for indoor lighting the outside should be slightly blown out, that is if you are going for realism. Render the image out as a 32bit exr then you can tone map the outside like you would with a normal photograph.
here you can see by just adjusting the exposure value on the dome light you get exactly what would happen with a real camera. You can then bring down the highlights by tone mapping the image
This is just some basic color corrects on the image. This can be done much better, but this is the basic principal. A is raw and B is with the corrections applied
that looks good and it sounds like a realistic approach. To be honest: I couldn't figure out, what exactly "exposure" does but your explanation makes sense. Thanks for the hint! I'll try it out.
OK, here are the results. The first pic ist the version with the area lights before the windows. The second one only has one dome light with an intensity of 4 and an exposure of 2. I guess, I have to play around with all those buttons to find a decent look. But I like both, the first one is softer, the second one is more realistic. And the second produces a lot of noise. I've tried the same approach with different scenes and the effect is always the same: one single dome light with exposure produces pretty much noise. That can be removed with the denoiser or by tweeking those millions of settings.
