rendering an interior

[bluwaveside]

Having trouble rendering this interior. 

My first approach test001 was using portal lights but that took a long time to render. Or maybe I just had the settings wrong for that render. 

render settings had about 12 portal lights 
set to direct lighting with 32 samples 

an environment light set to raytrace background 
with a few area and spot lights. 

2nd approach test002 
I killed all the portal lights 
have an env light set to raytracke background 
just have spot and area lights 

then I did a third render test003 
and after this one I felt stuck. 
tried adding a bounce light with area light and I just didn't get the result I wanted. 

rop settings 
pixel samples 4 x 4 
color limit 5 
reflet / refract 5 
direct lighting as color 

tried adding a GI light and that doesn't seem to help either. 

I know overall shaders need work, but just wondering what I'm doing wrong here. 

Edited April 21, 2015 by bluwaveside

[jrockstad]

The first one looks quite nice to me overall - what exactly is it that you're dissatisfied with? Just the render time? You might try reducing the number of portal lights - 12 may be overkill for this scene. Try placing them to match up with the partitions of the window frames, so you'd end up with probably around 7 (if I'm interpreting that space correctly).

 

The problem with interior scenes is all that indirect light bouncing around, so the strategy should be to convert as much of that into direct light as you can. You really have to approach interiors like a photographer - if you look at those beautiful interior shots in magazines and catalogs, the reason they look so nice is because the photographer is using bounce cards, reflectors and fill lights to get the light where they want it to go. For example, consider that back wall in your scene which is getting that nice warm sunlight - you could reinforce that by placing an area light against the wall and giving it a yellow-orange tint, so you are basically converting the slow indirect light bouncing off the wall to faster direct light. Using this technique you may find that you can get by with fewer GI bounces and thus be able to bring your render times down a bit. 

 

Some resources of interest include Adrian Lazar's Advanced Lighting in Houdini and Donny Yuniarto's Interior Rendering Masterclass course on cmiVFX. There is also a thread here on OD Force with some discussion on interior rendering techniques:

 

http://forums.odforce.net/topic/17352-archviz-demystified-ii/