VRay Interior HDRI Lighting – PRO VRay Tips for setting up Interior (HDRI) Lighting – Set basic ambiance to approach design – LIKE A PRO!
This way – You can concentrate on geometry and not get distracted by color (textures) or artificial lights.
Once you get that stage “approved” you can move on to the next – Level 2 (which is; final textures & lighting), AND That we are going to explore in real depth next week.
Here’s a few good tricks for treating your (Sketchup) Models inside 3Ds Max.
Interior HDRI Lighting is a great method for getting photorealistic interiors with ambient lighting. The first rule while working with lighting is to just focus on lighting alone. Fine tuning the materials and render settings come later in the process.
While importing the scene as an FBX, I had a unit mismatch. Using a tape measure, the ceiling height appeared to be in inches. Since my 3ds Max setup is in cms, I scaled the model by 254%. The model had a single faced glass window with no volume. To realistically simulate windows, we need a box shaped geometry with some width. I’ve placed my camera at one of the corners with a wide focal length of 25mm. A height of 160cm is good for the camera with a vertical tilt shift correction.
The camera has an aperture of 4.0, shutter speed and an ISO of 100.
So what we’ll do is apply a neutral gray material to this Cubicco interior setup. To make sure the light enters our scene, we’ll exclude the glass windows from the VRay Override Mtl. The glass has a simple transparent material with a pale blue fog color and a multiplier of 0.001. Glass has an IOR of 1.6 and a reflection glossiness of 0.99.
For the lighting I’ve put a VRay Dome with a sky HDRI map and set it to invisible. Adding a VRay Plane for the ground helps in giving the image good exterior light bounces and a horizon line.
If you want to see the exterior sky in the render, add a duplicate of the HDRI onto the Environment Map slot. Reduce the Overall and Render mult. for this map to tackle the overexposure. To get better illumination in our interior, we’ll need the sun direction pointing towards our windows. I’ve added and rendered a simple pillar to check the light direction of the HDRI. From that information, I’ve applied a simple angle correction of 45 degrees to the map.
For the test renders, I’m using Adaptive Subdivision sampler for fast renders. The IM uses low preset with 25 subdivs and 15 interp. samples. The LC has 500 subdivs. To get a better quality of GI I’ve increased the previous IM values to 100 and 100. The LC subdivs can be set at 1200.
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DOWNLOAD SAMPLES with HDRI SETUP
Talk soon,
Alex
