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Good afternoon...

for a domestic furniture shot as shown in the picture; what is the most effective (look & rendering time) lighting setup?

It is a fully enclosed room with two doors. The window shall not be shown in the scene. I suppose, one needs a very bright overcast sky HDR image to achieve that sort of mood, the window without glass pane, plus one softbox (one emitter) from the front?



Thanks for some suggestions; I have not found any online photo courses specific to lighting domestic furniture, lighting, accessories, etc.

I would just use one emitter from the right. Make it as big as the window that is not visible. You can play with the lights color to change the mood.

Cheer, Florian

Thanks!

So, no Sky or HDRI environment, but a single emitter plane outside the glassless window in order for the light diffusing softly into the room, onto objects placed by the wall. Is it advisable to keep the doors open so some rays can escape the room? Or even better, to leave the rear wall out altogether?

Why make an entire room? It will just add to the render time. I'm sure you can find an appropriate overcast HDR or a of an interior. Then model only the wall and the floor, put it in the HDR environment and add an emitter to act as the window light. You can even texture that emitter with a real window HDR. Pretty easy to make one yourself if you have a camera (if it can shoot RAW even better): put the camera on preferably a tripod or anything that can hold it in the same position for several shots, shoot several exposures from very dark so you only see a faint outside light, to very bright were most of the window is overexposed. If you shoot raw you can get away with 2 fstops of difference between each exposure (keep aperture and ISO the same and change only iso, so for ex. 1/5th, 1/20, 1/80th, 1/320 etc.), if your camera does only jpg, then shoot with 1 fstop difference. Merge these different exposures in Photoshop using File>Automate>Merge to HDR pro. Save it as an exr instead of .hdr to save a little disk space, then use it as a textured emitter.

Unfortunately its not that simple if you want a result as per the photo, you will need to model the room, (except the back wall). Light has direction and hdri / plane emitters wont give you that directional light and sense of scale, without some geo to interact with.

I would make a hdri out of two hdri's the portion to be seen thru the missing wall would have an interior setting ( a wall pretty much) and the portion seen through the window opening would be sky.

I would check the levels in each hdri first using appropriate camera ev setting in maxwell to callibrate them.

Ok. So a closed room with one emitter in lieu of a window is not good then.

The room exists in 3D (as it does in reality, like in the linked photo). I have the floor and ceiling textures (high density smooth polished concrete) as well as the floorboard texture (wooden boards).

I was thinking, if I use a single existing (or self-made) quality overcast sky HDR image, I would mimic what occurred in reality (the photo shooting). So that is not sufficient? Why is that?

By the way, from Dosch and other vendors, I have not seen empty room interiors (or backplates for that matter) suitable for maxwelling furniture, lighting and accessories; only kitchens, living rooms, offices or corporate lobbies crammed full of stuff...

feynman wrote:I would mimic what occurred in reality (the photo shooting). So that is not sufficient? Why is that?

feynman wrote:what is the most effective (look & rendering time) lighting setup?

Removing the back wall is about rendering time, thats really the only maxwell related issue. The issue of what hdrs are (they are sample of the light at a SINGLE POINT in space) / how hdri works is something covered widely online (occasionally you will find facts but mostly one finds nonsense) - thats how the internet works I guess.

P.S. 95% of photographers also don't know how to use it properly, they just want to sell hdri's... dosch... urghh they fail in too many ways.. gamma, the view, camera height.. moofe have very bad quality - artifacts..

But finding an overcast sky is easy, doesn't even need to be high res.

P.P.S If you do stick an emitter outside the window give it some space a meter or so, not just 1 cm outside, thats the same as 1 cm inside.. no?

eric nixon wrote:Unfortunately its not that simple if you want a result as per the photo, you will need to model the room,

Honestly? You're saying you can tell from that photo that setup couldn't be shot in a hangar, with a big emitter to the right, and only a wall and floor?

Don't go nuts people....



Unless it's not obvious from the pricetag in the photo, that wasn't shot in a little bedroom, it was shot in an IKEA store, where the ceiling height is about 5m, and that furniture is in a big hall with no immediate walls all around it. But of course we can all see that from the lighting....it's obvious!

But... God knows!

Ok, so what I need for the looks and speed is to 1. to remove the back wall from the room and either 2a. find a quality overcast sky HDR image (what is better than Dosch?) or 2b. put a single emitter plane one metre away outside of the window cutout, but 3. not use a HDR image and emitter plane concurrently- right?

Excuse the crappy textures , did this from start to finish in 15 mins let it render for 30 .Which at this scale I thought it was pretty fast in relation to noise (my machine is not very fast 3930k). I've attached a zip of the scene it might give you a start , looking back at it would have made my light spread slighly less.Also would have spent more time on colour of enviroment and light.Anyway its a bit crap but might help
Best

Matt

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/483 ... kshelf.zip

Thanks a lot - that nearly captures the spirit of the original. The light from the window does not decay towards the left as in the original photo, but then that may be vignetting on the photo itself. Once I'm at a PC with MR, I'll give that a go. Did you use a room with the wall opposite the window removed and a HDR image of an overcast sky? Or did you use no HDR image and a single emitter plane in lieu of the window? Or both?

Hi Feyman ,
I went down a similar path to what Mihai had already suggested .Its just a backwall and floor , created some flags for the window and exterior right wall shape. With regards to lighting , I used a directional light created in modo which I can change the spread angle on (I'm not sure if you can export them from any other package have a feeling Marton said only the modo plug in supports it ,I would just use maxwell physical sun if you cant and line it up and change the radius factor/colour temp on that).So that was my main light , and I just used a single colour enviroment hdr to simulate the bounce light in the room.

With regards to the left hand side , to darken it I would just create a black flag on that side slightly out of shot to pull it down a touch.Or flag it from the right to create a grad if that was not enough. I noticed that myself afterwards but didn't want to re render as I knew my solutions to this.

The file will make more sense than what I'm writing hopefully .


best

Matt

Thanks for explaining!

So, it's only a wall, a floor and a wall with a hole for the window. We only have engineering/design softwares, so this Modo thingy won't work, but I will try to use a HDR image and an emitter plane outside of the window as suggested.

also you can use a little bit dirty wall texture....There are small scratches on the wall...
Try Multilight feature of Maxwell Render, maybe it can help.