3D architectual lighting (uni project)

philio16 · 3 Mar 2006 at 16:34

Hey

I'm modelling our building at university in Max (from autoCAD blueprints provided by the maintenance peoples). I'm fine with the modelling, not quite finished yet, but I was looking for some help with lighting. Never done architectural lighting before! In the image I've attatched I have a skylight and a spot light, rendered with the default renderer in max with light tracer activated. I think it looks ok for a first attempt but how can I improve it?

Cheers!

dadofsam · 3 Mar 2006 at 17:55

Looks very good to me, have you used brazil ever for rendering as that opens a whole host of options, but also, if not already try maybe making a Clay Render of it, a good tutorial is here:
http://www.tutorialoutpost.com/count/2678
it helps it look more "smooth" but also normally for me better results.

Scarylion · 3 Mar 2006 at 18:02

Ha, Is that the centenary building?

Messiah Khan · 3 Mar 2006 at 21:38

Its looking good so far. Your on the right track with the lighting at the moment. As already mentioned, 3rd party renderers can produce some great lighting effects, my personal favourite renderer being Final render. Although with the a bit of playing, the default max renderers can produce great results. Also have a look at rendering out the scene in multiple passes, so you have the specular layer split from the shadow layer etc. Then put them into photoshop, allowing you to tweak the settings. You might also want to try experimenting with HDRI lighting, which basically uses a very high bitrate panoramic image as the lightsource. A final thing to read up on, might be global illumination, which is the light that bounces around once it has struck a surface.

philio16 · 5 Mar 2006 at 12:20

Scarylion said:
Ha, Is that the centenary building?

Yes it is! Do you know it?

Kahn - I've dabbled around with some of those in the past, but never on an important project. Had a look at finalRender which looks pretty snazzy but I can't afford it really

Thanks for the info tho, I'm going to do some reading up!

Chaos · 5 Mar 2006 at 13:05

Theres an interesing article about lighting theory here -

http://www.itchy-animation.co.uk/light.htm

philio16 · 24 Apr 2006 at 17:25

Well I finally finished it.....

Animation

if you would like to view the final animation, its ~8mb, 35 secs long!

Can put my feet up and relax now....just need to burn the CD for midday tomorrow!

luckypapyrussam · 24 Apr 2006 at 19:14

Thats a cool animation you have got there

Sam. Aka Wir3d