View Full Version : Interior Lighting in No Time. Help?

08-24-2006, 04:26 AM
I'm building the interior of a pub for a job, and the client's thumb-fingered their schedule - consequently, I've got about 2 weeks to get the thing done and rendered, not the month I thought I had.

This turned my thoughts to quick and dirty ways to get nice subtle lighting inside a high-detail structure. Now, if I understand it correctly, the fact that it's an interior structure rules out using Ambient Occlusion, as the background is uniformly closed off. Is this the case?

If not, could someone please post up a node-tree showing the correct employment of an Ambient node? I've tried hooking it up and just get what looks like a 100% self-lit surface.

Any other genius ideas for rapidly solving a multiple-source soft-shadow lighting rig for a complex environment (it would be a pub. All that glass. All those mirrors. Oh, my aching eyes) are very gratefully accepted.

Captain Obvious
08-24-2006, 05:33 AM
Ambient occlusion with a max range specified will work, but I don't think it would be ideal in a situation like this. I don't know exactly how to use the ambient occlusion nodes in LW9, though.

Area lights are nice, but it renders slowly.

Is this for animation, or for still images? I guess if it's just a still, you could turn on global illumination, use area lights, etc, and still have enough time. If it's an animation, you could always use area lights without GI and employ one of those online render services to save time.

08-24-2006, 08:58 AM
Just plug the Occlusion node into the diffuse input and set the quality and a range for indoor work (infinite will just be like a BKdrop pass). You could add in a multiply node to allow you to scale the strength of the Occlusion.

08-24-2006, 05:23 PM
Thanks, chaps - I'll see what I get out of it.

08-24-2006, 07:10 PM
If you're animating then bake the b*gger, even if you're just running off several independant shots it could save a fair bit of time. Adding reflections and even more lighting is still easy and very fast to render.

Ran an animation of the front room with baked walls sofas, glass units, tv etc. A still radiosity image would take about twenty minutes. Once I'd baked out the textures I ran off a 750 frame animation in about an hour, AND, I haven't got the power of your kit!!!

Might be worth a shot :)

08-24-2006, 09:04 PM
Ambient Occusion is a necessity, IMO - it adds so much depth to the lighting with very little rendering overhead. Baking the solution would be optimal, if you have time in the beginning it will save a lot during the final render.

If that's not possible, you'll have to fake your GI.

Check out some posts by Otacon he's very good at this type of thing.

08-24-2006, 09:20 PM
Should say, when I baked the front room objects it took over twenty four hours on very low poly objects using LW 8.5 and the old surface shader.

Ran a quick test just now to see how that compared with the new surface baking camera. This is only 250 poly's or so baked with 1 distant light and background radiosity (It's the interior upper floor and stair area of the Wtools mansion). Not a great example but it took 4mins 18 secs (300% background radiosity at 5x15+point light) on a 1.6Ghz centrino laptop.

With the pub, the only surfaces to bake are things like woodwork, flooring, ceiling etc. Mirrors and glasses don't need to be baked. Your outputs can be modified in photoshop and you can add as much detail as you want :)

ps I'm not recommending you bake at 512*512 :D

[EDIT] - fprime renders there for completeness sake - it's not using baked camera UV's

08-27-2006, 07:49 AM

I'm trying a bit of baking, not really had too much experience with it before. So I've got my Atlas map (just taking the defaults), set up a quick and dirty light rig and whacked on Radiosity.

Took - again - mainly defaults on the Baking Camera, and told it to render at 1024x1024.

Bopped F10.

Applied the resultant image as a Colour texture to the appropriate Atlas Map, cranked the surface luminosity to 100% as I'd expect that to Be About Right, and got this:


Big white seams. What've I done wrong, please? Pretty please? The Tron look is cool, but inapproriate.

(Darn fast to render that, though! Couple of minutes. Astonishing. I have Evil Wicked Plans involving simple stand-in shadowcast objects for pool tables and things, if I can get this working right).

08-27-2006, 07:59 AM
Ooo weird. I'll have a test with the mansion and see if I get the same thing.

08-27-2006, 08:17 AM
I am getting the same thing, light bleed around the edges, bum, you know what this means, we'll have to read the manual :D There's a few options in that baking panel, one of them will probably fix this.

Mind you, at a pinch it can be taken out in ps.

08-27-2006, 08:25 AM


Bit surprised that the defaults don't do the obvious though. Why won't it just... you know... read my mind or something. I'm wearing the special hat and everything....

08-27-2006, 08:30 AM
Jeremy is it er, could it be... THIS :)

-UV Border: This is the ‘overdraw’ of the UV polygon boundaries. Using this setting, you can remove the visible seams in your UV projection.
Paxo : Is that a guess Durham?

08-27-2006, 08:46 AM
Oooh, cracking. I'll just have a quick go at that...

08-27-2006, 09:06 AM
On my third attempt now, first time I overshot, second time I used a value of two which got rid of most of the seams but not all, now having a bash with a value of 3.5, all depends on your UV spacing of course, should have measured the gaps in my first bake but hey it's Sunday :)

08-27-2006, 09:10 AM
Ahhh, Sunday. Sunday, and Reading Festival is in full swing not 200 metres from where I sit, the lasses in their summer frocks and gumboots, like rubber-rooted flowers in full bloom. Placebo, Slayer and Pearl Jam are on today, we had Muse last night playing their excellent "Butterflies and Hurricanes", there's a gigalitre of ice-cold beer within a kilometre radius of me. It's a gorgeous day, warm and bright with puffy white clouds, and I've just had a text message from a colleague from the British Library saying how fantastic the festival ground is.

And I'm sat here buggering about with UV maps.

Someone just blimmin' well kill me.


08-27-2006, 09:15 AM
Hum. I turned it up to 4 and got bigger-looking seams.

Trying -4 on the assumption that an overshoot then a pullback is going to be less frustrating than inching towards success.

Why isn't this calibrated in either Metres or the UV-style 0 to 1 scale, then? Or is it actually calibrated so and by using non-nought-to-one values I'm confusing it?

*edit* Having all manner of no luck with this so far... :/ All my renders look identical, really.

08-27-2006, 09:20 AM
The UV border thing doesnt draw over any UV islands - they will meet in the middle. I always just stick it to 16.

08-27-2006, 09:23 AM
By "UV Islands" I assume you mean bits in the UV space that aren't occupied by any geometry?

Trying a bake with a UV Border of 16 now.

08-27-2006, 09:27 AM
Darn it. What is it with these white fringes? Now it's just drawing 16 pixel wide white fringes where my geometry turns corners.

I don't get it :(

08-27-2006, 09:31 AM
Could have been a slightly different scene set up that's giving different views, here's one on -1, but to be fair I've had pretty much the same result on +2 and +3.5.

Duke, why do you use 16? and do you have any tips? We need to get Bog to the gigalitre of ice-cold beer. In fact if we solve this I'm having a JD (That's the drink, not my cat of the same name :D)

08-27-2006, 09:39 AM

Here's my dataset, it's so blisteringly straightforward that I can't see an obvious point of failure :/


I do appreciate this, chaps.

08-27-2006, 09:45 AM
I'm trying a new UV map with a relative gap size of 0, on the off-chance that it's them UV Islands that's causing the trouble.

**** islanders. Why can't they live in peace? (Yes, I'm starting to lose it)

08-27-2006, 09:50 AM
I just brought the original 7 layer model into 1 and merged points, thought that might have been to blame, alas no :(

08-27-2006, 10:02 AM


I'm going to look really silly if I'm wrong aren't I. Coupleof minutes for a new render, I'll be back.

08-27-2006, 10:06 AM

Who's the daddy, who's the daddy.

Get thyself to the festival :D :D :D :D :D

08-27-2006, 10:17 AM
Heehee :) Still can't get to the festival itself, but if this works I may wimble to one of the rather nice riverside hostelries and have a cold one.

By "Double Sided", you mean just the checkbox in the Surfaces panel, rather than copy-flipnormals-paste, yeah?

*bops F10*

here's hoping. I'm still seeing some large white areas in my In Progress window, but if they're in places which can't be seen then frankly I shan't care. :)

08-27-2006, 10:28 AM
Ohohohohooooo T-Light you BEAUTY! That looks like it's turned the trick! Haahaaa! C'mere, giz a kiss (cue Spaced style "get off me you bummer" comments etc etc)

08-27-2006, 10:49 AM
Just do an interpolated radiosity render, and bake that thing.
Use the bake camera.
Make sure motion blur is on (0% blur if you want to)
do NOT set Cache radiosity to on
Use a decently high number for rays (9x12 or something)
Use high tolerance setting (0.75~0.95)
Use reasonable ray distance setting (15mm)
Use two or three bounces
the higher you set the anti aliasing passes, the better it will look. Don't judge on render preview, the AA passes will merge several crude passes into one nice and smooth one.
You can try noise reduction, but I am not a fan.

This is the best way to do animation or many stills with lightwave's render engine.

08-27-2006, 10:57 AM
You're a spaced fan :D
There's only me and a friend round there's parts who've even heard of it. Shame it had to end, one of the best comedy's in TV history.

08-27-2006, 11:05 AM
You're a spaced fan :D

The first series was superb, shame that the second series was so poor

08-27-2006, 11:06 AM
shame that the second series was so poor

Only by comparison.

"I once punched a man in the face for saying Hawk the Slayer was rubbish."


08-27-2006, 11:10 AM
Only by comparison.


Yes, that`s true, but I was so disppointed with it I had to go and drink eight pints of Guiness to get over it

08-27-2006, 11:36 AM

No Bog, you're 'defending the genre with terminal intensity, next time, give Krull a try' :D

That's very strange, I was thinking of the same quote there coming back from the shops.

08-27-2006, 12:20 PM
It's one of the more memorable quotes.

"No, I should have said "OK dad, we'll give Krull a try, and after that we'll sit down and talk about it".

It's just comedy gold - the fact that you've got someone clinically obsessed with Sci-Fi preaching moderation in dealing with people who want, for example, Jar-Jar Binks merchandise... ahhh, a big fat thick slice of deep-fried comedy gold.

And my radiosiwossname thingy works now. Woo!

Thanks again for the assist :D Might be "Pint by the River" time, indeedy.