Lighting technique

After spending a week experimenting/pulling my hair out with point lights and mental-ray options like final gather and global illumination i found out about jeremy vickery's workshop he did with Gnomon. Not to be mixed up with his practical light and colour dvd. I took parts from his teachings and came up with a technique that can be applied to most scenes. I add a spot or directional light with raytracing for outdoor sunlight. Plug the mib_amb_occlusion1 into all my shaders. I can then control the colour and level from either the dark or bright of the occlusion. I set this down low as a base colour/light and then use area lights to paint in the rest. I re-did the final room with this approach as well as the hallway at night and got some pretty nice and quick results. Both were done day after watching the tutorial.

The textures are looking alot better and i dont have any nasty shadows. Also theres a decent gradient from light to dark. Check out the blue colour near to the window areas. Adam recommended this to me a couple of weeks ago. I also added some spec to some of the frame parts and the skirting. Im looking forward to seeing this room once i get the broken glass dirt textures done this week.

You cant see the window walls but theres some nice bounce light. In general i place a area light coming from where ever light is cast, one facing up and one down. One facing down replicates the light and the one facing up is bonce light.






Im finding this the best technique. I want to learn more about how light reacts in the real work rather than how to switch on a button in mental ray settings. Bounce light been key to both a believable and/or cinematic scene. As i found out with textures, build a base and work from there.