lighting for interior rooms

[Andrew Mac]

Thought this might be the best place to go for lighting ideas- I am creating lighting fixtures for an interior room- It is a chandelier with 8 downlights- What is the best way to represent this?

Do I use spot, point light or directional light and typically what level would I use?

[EAlexander]

Without seeing the shape of it I would guess Spotlights.  If they are truly down lights, then spots would be right - you can adjust the beam angle to make it more focused and narrow, or open up wider to give you more coverage.

 

Omni light is like an exposed lightbulb (without the socket) - so a ball of light emitting in all directions.  So if you had just exposed bulbs, this is the way to go.

 

Directional light is about parallel beams of light - think sunlight here - so not a cone of light but a even direction of light rays.

 

(Technically, the sun is hitting us in a cone shape, but it is so large and so far away, that to human eyes, the rays appear to be parallel.)

 

For level - you just have to try it out and see what feels right.

 

e.

Edited May 23, 2019 by EAlexander

[Dave Donley]

If you will ultimately be rendering with Renderworks, consider trying out making a texture resource that uses Glow for the Reflectivity shader, and apply that to the shade/glass of the lamp.  You can control the brightness of the Glow effect in the shader controls.  Then, to see the glow effect you have to render in Renderworks render modes with the Lighting Options using a choice other than None.  The glow effect is produced by the indirect lighting engine.

 

This technique is probably the best for producing soft lighting from non-point lit surfaces.

 

[scottmoore]

Agreed on all the above. 

 

The thing about lighting and glow textures is that you simply have to dig in and experiment. Everything impacts everything else. Brightness, color, location, rendering styles, ambient light, number of reflections, camera effects, the texture onto which light is projecting, etc. 

 

I used to wonder why, in the credits of an animated movie, that they listed personnel for “lighting”. Typically a lot of personnel. I don’t wonder that anymore.