Kitchen interior

[fario]

This helps to flood the scene with light and to significantly decrease render time.

Dries?

could you please explain this to me?

Thank you.

Antoine

[DriesV]

This helps to flood the scene with light and to significantly decrease render time.

Dries?

could you please explain this to me?

Thank you.

Antoine

Sure thing...

When you depend entirely on an HDRI to light a scene through (tiny) windows, it will take very long to get rid of the noise in your image. It will take a long time for the HDRI light to bounce around your scene.
When you add a large planar area light in your interior, you significantly increase the light levels in your interior scene (you 'fill' the scene with light ) and the noise will clear up much faster.
A disadvantage of this approach is that the lighting looks less natural.

Dries

[PhilippeV8]

Yes, but on the other hand ... how many times did you manage to take a good photo of an interior without adding lights/flash in real life ... it has to be quite sunny outside to start off with.
Still, a renderer should be made such that it's able to pull this off I think 

[DriesV]

Sunny kitchen.
Zip package added in previous post...

Dries

[fario]

ok, thank you very much for your explanations.

Antoine

[fario]

Do you know why I have these artifacts?

I, however, put my maximum settings.

Antoine

[DriesV]

Do you know why I have these artifacts?

I, however, put my maximum settings.

Antoine

Because you're rendering with advanced render settings.
I find advanced rendering generally unsuitable for low lit and/or high GI dependant interior rendering.
Time/Sample limit rendering gives much better and more consistent quality.

Dries

[DriesV]

Another sunny shot.

Dries

[KeyShot]

We are going to optimize KeyShot more for these kinds of interior shots in future releases and add support for a sun / skylight system.

[fario]

good job Dries!!! hehe

[fario]

Scene completely closed, except the window.
Environment: Torino_Palace.
Lighting: only hdri and one spot (ies) against the wall.
Rendering time: 55 minutes - 8 core intel.

there are too many artefacts in the shadows. 

I think Keyshot solves quite well the lighting of the scene, with so little light.   

Antoine

[PhilippeV8]

I've got a set of kitchen hoods that would fit so perfectly in this image ...  I'll do a render once I got KS4 installed here ...

[fario]

hahaahah!

I found a way ...

Antoine

[jbeau]

Cool, thx for sharing!!

[DriesV]

I've been revisiting this scene. Trying out some lighting methods.
The interior is fully enclosed (no open walls, no blown off ceiling), with two windows.
What I'm finding to work reeeeeally well for rendering interiors is a combination of:

• blank HDRI (black) with a small ultra-bright, ultra-low falloff pin light
• a plane with area light (all options off, except for light direction) placed behind every window (surface of area light larger than window area) with moderate brightness.
• a plane with area light (all options off, except for light direction) placed inside the interior with low brightness.

The pin light mimics the sun and casts sharp shadows across the interior, as well as generates strong highlights.
The area lights act as fill lights to 'flood the scene' with light. They also mimic the ambient illumination of the sky. This does wonders to reduce image noise during realtime rendering.

Using this method, interiors can be rendered pretty fast. Even in realtime render modes. I think the quality that can be obtained is fantastic.
The image is an unedited KeyShot screenshot.
What do you think?

note: Now if only I could find some high quality contemporary interior models that would be workable (material grouping, part break-up...) in KeyShot straightaway...

Dries