Lighting bedroom- W.I.P

Lighting a bedroom scene

My main, current idea for this bedroom is to create a room where a college music student has been up all night trying meet his deadline extension. He had to compose some sheet music, so stayed up all night trying to complete it.  There are strewn, screwed up pieces of paper with failed writing attempts littered around, particularly around the bin, where he has missed! There are also piece of music that haven't been screwed up littered on the bed and surrounding floor. There 3/4 full bottle of wine on his bedside table, empty wine glass kicked over on the floor.  

The lamp next to his bed is still turned on, bringing attention to the music books and clock on his bedside table.  Other objects include an ashtray with many smoked cigarettes but one half smoked. I want to give the audience the impressed he has rushed out of his bedroom in order to meet his deadline

Lighting 

I want the time of day to be an early winter morning, in the northern hemisphere. I want there to be an orange hue to the light streaming in through the window.  I want there to be a dusty/ smoke residue atmosphere and will use Arnold atmospheric volume to create this.  This will enable me to create 'god rays' through the blinds which will help to suggest dust/smoke particles in the air. 

1 - Simple skydome setup, with a distance light for the sun for the sunlight streaming in through windows - there are also quad portal lights outside the windows to help reduce the noise and help guide the skydome light sampling through the windows.  Added some textures to wall and floor from substance Source.  

2 - Added some extra lights to enable me to create the sun beams/god rays through the blinds.  Tweaked the lighting setup and added 2 spot light outside of the two windows, I found I wasn't getting the results I wanted by just using the distance light.  By adding the two spot lights, together with the distance light, I could have the beams and sunlight working together. I just had to make sure they were all pointing in the same direction so not to break the illusion.
I also added colour to the other wall and some textures on the posters. 
What I want to do now, is change the hue of the light to an orange colour.

Current light setup

More orange in the sunlight so to give the impression of early morning:

Looking out onto a rainy street -W.I.P

Looking to create a scene with someone looking out of a window, onto a shiny, wet street. Light reflecting in puddles from street lights, vehicles and building.  I want it to be very colourful and vibrant on the outside, but in the interior I want it to be quite dark and depreciated.  I want to tell a story about a building and a person who has been left behind and is stuck in the past. I want it to be set in a UK city, during the Autumn at around 10pm.

Window Model:

I'll base the window on something like the image below - quite old and worn to give personality.

 

First window render - 

I've modelled the window and walls and have put in a HDRI map sky.  I reduced the output amount of the HDRI as it was too bright for 10pm at night during the autumn.  

I've applied a simple glass shader to the window pane and increased transmission values in the render settings to increased the amount of light and colours from the sky coming through the window.  You can also see the reflections on the glass, coming from the interior. 

I think I may need to soften the shadows but will see what it looks like after adding more lights. 

Wallpaper and test materials/lights

I want to create a wet and shiny cobbled street area outside so the colours from the reflected lights travelling across it like these examples:

I really like the way the colours splash across the ground, and create almost a painted effect from the reflected light.  I think it adds a lot of depth to texture as well. Also, will help with the contrast between the dreary inside and modern, colourful exterior.

Not too sure about how intense the light appears on the reflective surface - will lower it to experiment.

lowered exposure too much here after halving it, the reflected light is no longer visible. 

Material setup: added screen and coat layer to a cobbled street texture 

PBR Marble lighting exercise - Caustics

Marbles give the opportunity to explore refractive caustics as they are made out of glass and often exhibit many colours.  Even though they are usually made out of glass, they have a kind of liquid appearance on the inside. I thought this would provide me with a good opportunity to recreate a physically accurate marble in Arnold.

Shaders, textures and geo

To create the marble, I used 2 spheres; a small inside a larger one.  The small inside sphere has a standard shader assigned to it, adjusted to represent water.  The larger, outer sphere, has glass settings applied.   I added some Helix shapes in the centre of the marble, with a standard shader applied, but with emission values and colours.  The caustics work 

I wanted to add some unique looks to the marble and make it a bit fancier so I applied a space/galaxy texture to the inner sphere, into the transmission and emission colour. I also added a black and white version into the opacity slot of the shader to allow light to come through.  After applying all these aspects, the texture could be seen on the shader surface.  

The subtle caustics can be seen on the table surface:

 

Lighting an exterior scene - Wooden cabin

I downloaded the scene from http://www.3drender.com/challenges/

HRDI map taken from https://hdrihaven.com/hdri

Textured using Quixel

Basic lighting settings for night scene:

HDRI - image based lighting used as primary light.  

Lamp placed on porch with mesh light to help light up the right side of the cabin and catch some of the displacement of the wood and brick textures.

Interior point light to have light shine through windows.

Small amount of fog used.

Linear workflow

Final night scene

Basic lighting settings for day scene:

HDRI - image based lighting used as primary light.  

Lamp with mesh light on porch rail to add extra lighting to front of the cabin.

Spot light with a gobo to create light through tree effect and sunrays:

Atmospheric volume used to enable sunrays.

Linear workflow

Final day light scene

Stairs Scene

Stairs with a spooky basement inside a regular home

I want this scene to be really simple, mainly to explore how light can be used to guide the player through an environment. I've taken inspiration from the games like, 'Layers of Fear', 'Everybody's Gone to the Rapture' and  'Life is Strange',with these games abilities to utilise the environment/props to tell the story. I also love the sunset lighting in Life is Strange and the mood it creates.
I don't want the scene to be a horror theme, more mysterious then anything else.  Use lighting to invite the player to explore the environment


Basic stairs scene lighting settings:

Skydome light = interior/exterior

Spot Light outside of upstairs window and outside main window

Atmospheric fog set to low, affecting main window light only.

Distance light for the sun- set to 1 to create soft shadows

Linear workflow

I want to shine the sun towards the stairs to guide the player to explore upstairs and have placed a spotlight at the top of the stairs to add to this.




Added atmospheric fog affecting only the spotlight coming through the window. I also changed the Kelvin value to reflect a sunset at 3100k for the sun and 4000k for the skydome light.  I'm happy with the amount of light bounce around the room and light hue so I'm going with the image in the bottom right of the 4 above.

This the lighting setup in my scene.


 Adding basic textures and adding a basement opening

 I added a few textures and also a basement entrance under the stairs.  I've put an area light pointing upwards to create interest and guide the player towards it.  I'm still deciding on which colours to pick fot the basement area under the stairs. In the image above, I like to contrast with the blue blub, which transitions into a warm light.  However, I want the basement to be a cold place, in both mood and temperature, so I may switch them around. I also want to add a small amount of furniture and some smaller details into the scene.

I changed the colour of the bulb above the basement opening and also the light coming from the basement.  However, I think looks a bit too much like daylight so I think I'll make it bit bluer.
I've added a console table, which currently has a Bonsi tree on it, I'll add more props to this table - perhaps the player could interact with them?
There's a big bare wall above the console table I think i'll put a mirror on and maybe some more picture on the wall to the right.

I'm going to add some light fixtures like this to the walls, but switched off.

Added wall lights with two spot lights pointing up and down. Think i'll keep them on because they seem to not distract too much, also as it's early evening it seems like it could be viable - they could be dynamic and turned off/on. Next I'm going to make the light streaming through the window more orange hue.

I think the light fixtures are too distracting so I also rendered without: I've also adjusted the angle of the sun rays - the sun is setting so the rays would be streaming through flatter due the sun being low.

I added some more props - specifically the chair. Want to make it look like it's been moved out of the way from the basement entrance under the stairs.

Scene at night:

set-up:

I changed the wall fixture lights to IES profiles for added realism. I found using spot lights too hard to control the distance the light reached.  Adding a Decay Filter increased render times too much.

Trouble shooting

Ran into some issues along the way - had fireflies, particularly on the floor.   I scoured the internet forums for solutions and the official 3ds Max Arnold docs but everything I tried didn't solve the issue. The general consensus on the forums was by increasing the render quality settings, the fireflies would resolve.  This is not really solving the problem and would just create a more expensive render, plus it didn't get rid of the fireflies anyway!  The Arnold docs have a tutorial on using a ray-switcher which allowed you to assign a simpler standard shader to the floor shader specular attributes - this didn't work either.  After playing arouond with some settings in the floor shader and a few hours of rendering, I found by switching off  'in-direct specular' the fireflies disappeared.  This wasn't an ideal situation however, because I wanted some amount of this just to increase realism in the lighting, it looked slightly flat without it, so luckily I could decrease the value to 0.2-5 and this seemed fine.

Scene with fireflies:


The finished scene after turning down in-direct specular:

Unfortunately, the renders are still quite grainy, but this is due to lack of computing power! It wouldn't render out at much higher values.


Finished scenes:

Early evening:

Night:

Overcast day:

Alternate version with different textures

I wanted to change some texture to show the lighting a bit more - a higher value specular floor reflects some colour variation from the lights.

Everything was made in 3ds Max.
I didn't create the chair or the Bonsai, large plant and lamp on the side table - these were downloaded from Substance Source.

Lighing the attic scene

The attic

My aim was to create a lowly-lit, cool atmosphere - taking my inspiration from the film Insidious.  I especially like the lamp film, so I made this the centre piece!

I added atmospheric fog to dramatise the scene. I love the effects of volume lighting so I combined atmospheric volume with the light that's being emitted from point light from the lamp bulb. I modeled the lamp, which is based on the bedside lamp from Insidious,  I chose it mainly because I thought the holes in the shade would be a good opportunity to work with the volume lighting and create an interesting effect with light coming out of the holes.
Although I wanted it to mainly be a cold,eerie looking scene, I added a warm light through the door, which I also wanted to use it to cast a bit of light on the end of the bed and floor and to create a temperature contrast and catch other angle of the geo for silhouettes.  

Outside the window I added a another spot light which I've used to convey moonlight, which also creates shadow from the blinds, casting onto the floor.There is also a mood-light in the right-hand corner of the room, which is a simple mesh light.  I wanted to give a small idea of the other corner of the room, but not have it out do the main lamp light so it's quite dim. 

I felt it wasn't very believable to have such a dense atmosphere in an interior without a clear source, so I turned off the volume parameter of the warm light and the moonlight and I turned the lamp volume down to 60% shown below.




Finished scene: 





  Troubleshooting 




"Fireflies"

I had some issues in my renders with fireflies; the white, hot pixels of light appearing on the reflective surfaces.  I had my bedside lamp set extremely bright, so I lowered it to help stop the white dots appearing.  I've added a screenshot below of the affect area, before and after adjusting the light intensity from 80 to 30:

Before:

After:

Adding IES profile (https://leomoon.com/store/shaders/ies-lights-pack/)

In the final images I reapplied the volume fog, setting it to the lowest possible setting 0.01 and so it only affects the bedside lamp. Although it still looks quite strong, I'm happy with it.

Final render of attic


Created entirely in 3Ds Max 2020 with the Arnold render

I made the walls/foor/roof /lamp/cloth/books/board - other assets were downloaded from Substance and from http://www.3drender.com/challenges