From the course: 3ds Max and V-Ray: Interior Lighting and Rendering

Balancing lights

From the course: 3ds Max and V-Ray: Interior Lighting and Rendering

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Balancing lights

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- [Instructor] We now have all of our lights in place, and we can now start to adjust them to make sure the balance of the lighting is correct. Now, one of the things I did do was I added in one more fill light here. And this is actually the image that we have for the current lighting setup. Now, when you adjust lights, it's a great idea to use IPR, and then just work through the lights to make sure that everything is illuminating things the way that you want. I'm going to go into my IPR and we can do a little bit of that here. So let's go ahead and start IPR. And one of the ways I like to go through lights is just to flip them on and off, just to see how they're affecting the scene. So for example, if I select this light here, which is called VRayLightFILL2, you can see that this is illuminating basically that back wall. Now, if I turn if off you'll see why I created it. It's because this area of the image was actually pretty dark. So that coffee maker and that corner was actually a little too dark for me. And some of these corners here were too dark, so when I turn them on you can see how it just illuminates that, makes it just a little bit brighter. And adjust the balance of the lighting a little bit more. Now, if I want I can certainly bring that up or down. But you'll notice that as I change that light it does affect how the other lights are affecting the scene as well. So if this light is too bright, the other ones will be too dim. Now, one of the urges you'll have is to just continually increase the values of the lighting. There's not enough light here, so I'll increase the value of the light to make it brighter. But as you work through the scene you'll find yourself increasing the overall value of the light. So what I like to do is I always go back to the sun, because that's my main light. So if I go into my layer explorer here you'll see I've got a bunch of lights here in my default layer. If I take my sunlight here and I go back into IPR, you can see that when I turn off that light, and get a sense for what all the other lights are doing. So this is again, a way to understand what your ambient lighting is, versus what your main light does. So if I turn that back on you can see that the whole scene lights up again. And if we want, we can do things such as affect the color of the light. So my sun, I might want to make that just slightly yellow. So maybe if I turn my hue over to a yellowish color or yellow-orange color, and just bring that up just ever so slightly, and just add a little bit of a yellow tint. You can see that that again, adds a little bit more character to that light, cause sunlight does tend to be a little bit more yellow. Adding a little bit of yellow to that light will give just that impression that much more. So go through your lights, make sure you're not over lighting the scene, and balance your lights before final render.

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