I’ve been re-viewing Jeremy Vickers’ tutorial on Gnomon about Efficient Cinematic Lighting. He’s a big fan of the old technique of using area lamps to emulate bounce light, instead of actually using bounce light (indirect lighting, global illumination) which takes longer to render and tends to be noisy.
So here is my living room scene with almost no bounce light. There is one bounce for spec because otherwise there would be no reflections, and transparency requires quite a few to objects to actually appear transparent, but apart from that, none.
I got pretty close to the render that did use indirect lighting. That was a bit warmer and I probably need to warm up my area lights, given the colour scheme of the room. I have used a touch of AO (added in the compositor) and raised the darkest tones a tad so the shadows did not appear so dark (again, the compositor). Plus I added some bloom for fun.
I’m not sure how much render time I saved, as I don’t think I recorded how long the other render took. I guess I could render again and find out.
What to do next? Jeremy (who works for Pixar as a lead lighting artist) says people want to look at fantastic scenes, not ordinary scenes. Fantastic but believable. I guess sitting rooms are pretty ordinary scenes. No wonder I get no comments on my work. I’ll have to thing of something more interesting to make.