Problems with 3Delight interior lighting using AOA Advanced Lights

RobertDy

Hi, I use AOA's Advanced Lights to simulate the interior lighting of a room at night. I read from the discussions here that Distant Light is not recommended when doing lightings of interiors/enclosed spaces, so I used ambient and spot lights only.

I put 3 spot lights - each at the lamps/lights - and adjusted their spread angle to 360 degrees. In AOA's Spotlight, this means that they now act as point lights. The result I got is as attached and I labelled the problems in it.

1. The ceiling light has a black circle on it. To simulate the light emanating from this ceiling fixture, I put a point light right below it and this is causing the black circle. What do I do to get rid of it?

2. To simulate the light coming from the standing lamp on the left, I put a point light (yellow) next to it as well. The result is illumination around the light, but the light itself looks dark like it's not switched on. How do I make it glow?

3. The combination of lights illuminates the room realistically well, but the V4 figure looks overlit. I could adjust the lights to selectively not illuminate V4, since AOA's lights have this special function, but I'd of course prefer the lights to illuminate everything well without any need for individual adjustment. I've tried adjusting the intensities of the lights but it seems that a compromise in room illumination is needed to illuminate V4 realistically. Are there perhaps other ways to adjust this? (not sure if V4's skin surface can be adjusted to not absorb / reflect / glow under strong light?)

Thanks!

glaseye

3) The AoA spotlight has a setting to control the 'Falloff Rate' The 'realisticsetting would be "Squared" (brightly lit near the light, weaker at a distance)

1) apparently there is an object casting shadow... maybe under "Parameters / Display" settings turn off 'cast shadows' An alternative for the point light is using omnifreaker's uber area light (included with DS) on the ceiling lamp - or a primitive plane just below it....

2) again, uber area light settings on the lamp shade might do the trick, it will make the shade itself a lightsource, but also makes for a soft light effect

If you do have AoA's Advanced Ambient light, they can be very helpful in creating the ambient (obviously) effect around lights

Experimenting is the key, as each solution has its impact on render time, and requires the right render settings.

Richard Haseltine

Please don't post images of nude figures.

1) and 2) since the light is not coming from the light source you will get a sahdow of the fitting - as glasseye says,either turn shadows off on the light or use an emissive shader on the lit surface. For the shade you can use the Ambient colour and strength to fake glow (which may be too even) or you can use a shader with translucence. What I have often done iss et up a Shader Mixer sahder with translucence and also used a ray test/ray type brick to make the shade less opaque to light rays than to camera rays, so it lets light through without being see-through.