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