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I'm trying to recreate a conference room from a movie and I copied the window design from the movie into my blender project. The window is tinted light blue (transmission roughness 0.100), has around 50 horizontal panes that resemble window blinds (transmission roughness 0.500) and 4 vertical panes (transmission roughness 0.750).

I put a spotlight outside of the window to test its transparency and rendered using the Cycles viewport render (I waited for about 50 samples) and yet the inside of the conference room was still pitch black.

I have no idea what the problem is here, I don't know if it's something to do with the settings of the window or the renderer being faulty.

file attatched:

  • Apart from your windows being really thick (2.77 cm if this room is modeled to be real-life scale), to get more realistic windows there are other things to consider. First of all you shouldn't use a simple plane as suggested in the answer if you want to keep the IOR or it will not work correctly. Then with the glass from the linked video it's even unnecessary to use a plane. And you should turn down the Roughness unless you want frosted glass, 0.5 is much too high (also the 0.1 Transmission Roughness is a bit high). – Gordon Brinkmann Dec 25 '22 at 15:00
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    Another reason your indoor scene looks dark is not only Blender's glass material seems to absorb a lot light - if you think about it realistically, a 300 W spotlight 3 m away only shining through a small portion of tinted windows doesn't produce much light on the inside. For a sunny day, a lamp in Blender set to "sun" would be more like 700-1000 W/m² (which is much much brighter than the spotlight) and the blue sky would have a strength of about 20-40 instead of that medium grey at strength 1. Even then, cameras adapt to the quite low light with f-stops, ISO values and exposure settings... – Gordon Brinkmann Dec 25 '22 at 15:10
  • One more thing I should mention, using the modified glass material from the linked video below (you don't have to switch your Principled BSDF to a Glass BSDF by the way, it works with both), If you don't want to lose too much of your blue tint of the windows, the Transparent BSDF should be set to the same color as the glass. In the video there's no need to do it since they are both colorless. – Gordon Brinkmann Dec 25 '22 at 15:17
  • https://blender.stackexchange.com/a/219957/110840 – Allen Simpson Dec 25 '22 at 19:48

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Your window objects are way too thick. Replace them with a simple Plane object and you'll be good to go.

You should also consider a more lightweight glass material. Here's a great tutorial on a simple setup that will improve your render quality and render times: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brFGCDuReSU

Callmepro
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  • It would have been nice if you not simply linked to a video but explained the glass material yourself, quoting from the help pages here: "Links to external resources are encouraged, but please add context around the link so your fellow users will have some idea what it is and why it’s there. Always quote the most relevant part of an important link, in case the external resource is unreachable or goes permanently offline." Read more here: How do I write a good answer? – Gordon Brinkmann Dec 25 '22 at 15:20