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So I'm testing out interior scenes and I cant seem to get the lighting set up. The below image ran to an sl of 8, but it seems dark to me. I used a sky dome set to 100, and two emitters behind the camera, one correlated color at 4000 and 5000k, and both set to watts 100, efficacy 100. What is a good emitter setting to use for an interior shot like this? I just want the room to have a even, gentle, lit feel. Oh yeah, I already fixed the floor texture, but is there a general standard material settings for wall paint? I checked the mxm d/l section but nothing...Thanks for any insights.

apparently my maxwell skills are only rivaled by my forum skills (or lack of). I cant get the pic to work for some reason...

Hehe, your forum skills are just fine but the url seems to run of some secure server, see the "https" in the link. For some reason those can't be wrapped in the img tag thingy. Re-upload it to Imageshack or similar hostingplace and try again please

/ Max

Here it is

That was a bit creepy that we posted the picture within a minute of each other...but, yup, there it is.

I don't know how is scaled a skydome with power 100 instead a skylight with sunlight, but...what happens when you shot a room lit by midday sunlight and a 100W lamp? Probably it's almost the same if you turn off the lamp.
If you want to get a balaced atmosphere between some sunlight through the window and a warm room lit by a 100W lamp, you'll have to lower a lot your skydome (perhaps an orange-colored afternoon light) to begin to show up your emitters. And of course, lower shutterspeed to avoid a dark image

What are your camera settings, and how big is that room? In real life in a room like that, even with a couple of 100 watt bulbs going, to take a picture without using the flash you're probably looking at something like f4 to f5.6, and shutter 1/15 to 1/30. And you're going to have to overexpose the view out the window to get the exposure in the room right. The other alternative is to make the interior lights brighter.

There's a pretty good stucco material in the gallery that I've used on walls few times, just with the map scaled way down to look more like texture than stucco.

Here are my camera settings for that pic

Shutter 250
Fstop 4
focal 35

The scale was a litte large (it never seems to export right from 3ds max)

I guess I'm wondering if this a good way to light an interior scene. Or if I should be using a different light (I have no idea what real life studio lights are ) and if they should be placed in a diff. place then where they are. thanks.

1/250 is what you would use if you were standing outside that door. Try 30 or 60 and see how it looks. (You can do this without rerendering if you saved the MXI file.)

Go by lumens instead, it's easier to grasp since it's the actual amount of light emitted. The watts/efficacy setting is there for using when you want to match a real life light source, where usually you buy a 40watt bulb, and find out from the manufacturer what it's efficiency is (turning 40w worth of electricity into light).

Use pretty high lumens values, for example a 40w incandescent bulb at 12% efficacy outputs about 800 lumens. 800 lumens is a very weak lightsource, and you need a LOT of light for indoor photography. Start with maybe 7000 lumens.

Thanks for the tips guys. I'll make some adjustments tonight and then see how it turns out.