hdri interior

mibit

I create a complete interior environment. How do I light it soft and smooth? If I create a hdri lighting in the scene, this did not pass through walls. How should I do?

ManStan

With the interior lighting. Let me see if I can pull this out of my head; I've uninstalled carrara. But one of your light parameters is for soft shadows. You will have to play around with the setting because the default one is usually wrong. Just select your light source and I think it's in effects. Also be sure to set your range a bit short of the room size, and fall off to at least 50%.

Jonstark

If you want to use HDRI, you could (in the general tab) uncheck 'cast shadow' from your ceiling and walls, and the light should pass through them to light the inside of your room. You can leave the 'receive shadow' still checked and that way once the hdri light comes into the room and runs into something in the room, let's say a V4 for example, then the shadow that the V4 casts can still hit the wall and be visible.

This approach should work (I'm not where I can go test it right now) but remember you will be lighting your room unnaturrally with hdri light if you do it this way and the source for the light and the way it illuminates the room will probably not match up to where the actual lamps/lights are inside the room.

mibit

thanks both for the replies. In particular Johnstark, how would you suggest then you light up the room? I miss the chance to have a global illumination as a plan that gives a soft glow. For this I thought of hdri.

Jonstark

well using full global illumination is certainly an option. If you did that then what you would do would be to put actual lights in your room at the place where your lamp and light objects are (for example point lights resting just above the model of the bulb are). Then tune them to give realistic falloff (maybe using IES files) with soft shadows enabled (In the effects tab of the light) and render using full GI, should give fairly realistic effect and soft glow your looking for. Using Hdri is faster by far, of course, because you won't have to do nearly as much setup, but full GI isn't something I would discount at all (the main myth is that full GI is so super slow that it can't be used, and while it is *slower* it isn't so slow that I think it should be off the table).

Also you could set up your room using fake GI. There are tons of methods for this, and it isn't really my forte, so I won't get into it too much, but this involves putting lights where the primarly light emitters would be, then adding a host of less intense secondary lights to mimic the effect of light bouncing off walls, etc.

And the Hdri method might also be perfectly suitable, depending on the scene, so it's worth giving that a try too.

evilproducer

If you have the Carrara native content installed, there are scene presets that can be a valuable learning experience. Using the Wizard, choose Presets--> Indoor. There should be a whole lot of options. Click on the thumbnails for a description. There's also a scene preset that uses faked GI. Take a look at what was done to see what you can do.