How can I make my interior scene better lighted?

Question

I am using 2 sun lamps, the principal one has the strength set to 30.000, the other one is pointing in the opposite direction, is bigger, and has the strength at 1200. An HDRI is supposed to light up the scene a little bit more, but even with all of this, I haven´t achieved a nice lighting, I am using filmic color management with the exposure at 2100 in order to see what it is in shadow areas (sofa), but I end up having a lot of noise, even with 2000 samples.

My glass is made by a glass and a transparent shader, mixed by an 0.855 factor. I don´t think the problem is the glass, becouse i made a test, deleting it just to see what the light would do without it, and the result was the same.

2 Sun lamps? One with strength at 30 000? Exposure in Color Management at 2100? There is something really crazy about these values. — Mr Zak, Aug 16 '17 at 18:14
In this solar system we have only one sun... 2 of them doesn't seem right... Try using area lights, big soft sources that create very soft shadows, make those invisible to the camera (and maybe to the reflection, so they do not end up on the window). To control the shadow areas consider using the CDL node to shift the contrast of your scene (https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/57919/how-should-i-make-scenes-with-atmospheric-lighting-brighter/57927#57927). How you set up the glass shader might have a huge impact on the scene, please [edit] your question and add more information on it. — , Aug 16 '17 at 18:48
Are you using any clamping of either direct or indirect light? How many bounces? — bertmoog, Aug 16 '17 at 19:42
I don't think your second Sun Lamp is doing anything helpful to your scene (Except lighting the underneath of the floor). If there is a wall behind your camera I would remove it to allow your HDRi to let some light into you room. Maybe rotating your HDRI on the "Z" axis might help with the direction of light coming from it. Maybe add a Emission Plane behind or next to your camera to act as a "Fill" light (Pretend it's a window). — Dontwalk, Aug 16 '17 at 19:47
I did delete the walls behind the camera. The HDRI is pointing to the plane you can see outside and up on the left side- The second sun is supposed to give light from backward to the interior, it has a really big size, so it is not casting any shadows. I will try another source of lighting like the plane and the area lights, then see what happens — Santiago Steib, Aug 16 '17 at 21:02
Clamp Indirect at 1 will decrease the indirect fill light which is what most of your scene is lit by. Try a value of 10 or even try turning it off (0.00). The fireflies will increase but it will help with fill light. — bertmoog, Aug 16 '17 at 21:35
For the people who think that the values are crazy: That's what you can do when using filmic blender. It gives you more dynamic range to play with. — Hendriks3D, Aug 16 '17 at 21:42
@bertmoog Ok, I tried, but the noise increases a lot, and also the vierendeel volume on the right starts to vanish due to the brightness, It´s like it gets more lighten from underneath, so you can´t see the difference between the height of the slab and the X-Y axis. I get a better result increasing the exposure with the color management, but that doesn´t reduce the noise from dark areas. — Santiago Steib, Aug 16 '17 at 21:47
Essentially, clamping is unrealistic. There is no clamping in real life. The *only* reason it's included in Blender is to reduce high frequency noise. If you want a more realistically lit scene, set it higher and increase the number of samples or look for other noise reduction techniques: https://blender.stackexchange.com/a/84326/38953 — bertmoog, Aug 16 '17 at 22:14
Well, your image looks pretty good and looks pretty realistic (at least at that resolution). The only thing you're lacking is shadow detail. You could also "think like a photographer" and add fill lights to the scene. I understand about the render time but there are other tools to reduce noise (as my link shows). Anyway, just trying to help out, ultimately it's your baby and you know what you're going for. — bertmoog, Aug 17 '17 at 01:47

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Aug 17 '17 at 02:43

As I said, there are techniques at your disposal to reduce noise (and by extension, render time) that don't involve relinquishing your shadows. Here's an example showing how much Clamping actually affects shadow exposure. I've used the Denoising filter (for simplicity) included with Blender 2.79 Candidate but there are more effective and more flexible ways of controlling noise as well.

Denoising settings for this render:

Notice also the wood texture outside the window, with an Indirect Clamping value as extreme as 1.00, it's affected as well, since it's technically not Direct light.

Full size (Click to enlarge):

How can I make my interior scene better lighted?

1 Answers1