Inside Vue: Lighting Models Indoors

This is a followup to my comparison of Vue lighting models for an outdoor scene. Because lighting for indoor scenes is much different from outdoors, I am covering this topic in a dedicated post.

I set up a simple indoor scene, just an empty box with a few geometric primitives in one corner. Walls and floor are flat white, the ceiling is blue. Just as in the outdoor series, I made two variations of the scene. Again, all renders were made at a 640 x 480 resoulution on “Final” render level

1. Closed Box With a Single Point Light

For a closed box, Global Ambience, Ambient Occlusion and Global Illumination models are useless because they involve the influence of the sky on the objects.

You can easily see that Global Radiosity is a must for indoor renders. It is also advisable to make use of the boost slider as the results will look even more convincing.

2. Box with Indirect Sunlight Through a Window

The first noteworthy result is that Global Illumination works far worse here than Ambient Occlusion although it is supposed to be superior. And it beomes very obvious that even with Global Radiosity Vue has significant problems handling tricky light situations like this one. Even with a 4.0 boost setting there are obvious light leaks around some edges. I also played around a bit with the advanced indirect lighting and photon map settings within the render options dialog, but was not able to get much better results.

For lighting situations like this one, Vue is significantly inferior to unbiased renderers like LuxRender or Yafaray.

If you want to test render settings for this scene, here is the scene file as download:

download: Indoor Test Scene (318.34KB) added: 28/11/2009 clicks: 63 description: Indoor scene for testing lighting models

But beware, the user settings are set to extreme values, so the render time will be long, if you don’t change the settings.

Tagged as: lighting, Vue