Lighting & Render Tests (Patreon)

I thought I'd share a collection of  test images I did of lighting and render settings while making "Managerial Assistant".

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The first set of images use the UberEnvironment tool and rendered with 3Delight engine, which mimics light and shadows by occluding objects based on how close they are to other objects. Adjusting the shadow trace distance affects how far apart objects are before they "cast shadows" on each other. Increasing that number means that objects from farther away will cast shadows on each other, which naturally means a darker scene in most cases. By lowering that distance, there are less shadows cast on figures, so while it may be brighter, you lose some dimension to your figures and things could start to look flat.

Increasing the light intensity scale is pretty self explanatory by making the light stronger. Raising it too high could lead to high exposure levels and some harsh light cast on figures of portions of them. Adding a bounce light, even at 50% strength, starts to calculate not only shadow occlusion cast on objects based on proximity, but also how much indirect light will bounce from one surface to another also by their proximity. Render times will noticeably go up using this setting based on the extra processing the render engine has to do with light. Playing with these settings, you can find a good balance to your liking.

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For the second set of tests, I set up the scene in Iray with a blend of environment and stage light sources to get that strong daylight coming through the window. In a nutshell, the way Iray functions is that it calculates a guess of each particle and pixel in the scene on its color and value based on how light would play off of that point. It will take multiples passes (or iterations) at each particle, each time approximating closer and closer to reality. In the real world light affects and bounces off surfaces in infinite directions and angles, so Iray will never get to 100% real-world accurate, but through enough iterations it can get respectably close.

Graininess or noise in the render happens when Iray isn't given enough iterations to accurately approximate a pixel's value in the scene. So you can see in these small scale tests, as the amount of iterations increase, the image becomes more clear and less grainy. You can also see that the images get progressively brighter as the higher iterations calculate more of the light present in the scene.