Advice for lighting

Hi all,

My scene is lit with a strong sky, strength set at 18, a sun set at 8 and area lights pointed up at the ceiling. The bake created lots of black smudges which I removed by setting flood dark limit to 0.15.
There is still an ever so slight smudge behind the wall text, which is a transparent png place 1mm away from the wall surface.

Am I pushing it by relying on bounced light? Should I light more directly?

All crits welcome :slight_smile:

https://my3ideas.shapespark.com/uj_gallery/

Thanks
Jen

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Hi @peepshowillustration,
With object like the text on the wall you would get best result if you’d check in object tab “isolate shadows”. That way this object wouldn’t cast any shadows on the surrounding. You also have probably to few samples for a clean bake. Just raise them to 1000 or even 1500 and it will bake much cleaner.

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Thanks Kuba, I’ll try that. The wall text on a phone is illegible though, any idea why?

It is due to the way Shapespark compresses textures. You could try mapping a tiny part of the text texture on a 1x1m box that would be hidden under the floor. That way you should be able to stop the engine from compressing it that much.

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Excellent, thank you :pray:

My advice is not about lighting but about visualization:
The clients have given me good comments when in an exhibition they manage to face the work in such a way that they can appreciate it better. So what I have done is to record views (you may not show these views in the list) and make a trigger on all (or only some) pictures or art pieces, so that when someone clicks on them they automatically move directly in front of them. (You can see that effect in this tour, on the images to the right of the foyer https://all360.shapespark.com/ttp_interacoustic_v1/#mobilehi&autoplay)

Another way to make that text (at least with Sketchup) is to write it with the 3D text tool but without depth, that generates the letters as surfaces, you can give them the color you require and they will not be heavy but they will be very fast and easy to read. As Kuba says, you can eliminate the shadows and I think they will look better.

texto skp

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I just saw a problem, it has happened to me before, that has happened to me when a Light probe does not cover the whole space or you have more than one Light probe in the same space. One solution is to leave only one Light Probe that covers the whole space, the other solution is to change the floor texture to match the change of area between one Light probe and another.

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What a great idea, I shall explore that. Thank you :slight_smile:

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I shall look at that. I wonder why it’s like that though?

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@peepshowillustration, Shapespark uses a fast approximate technique of rendering real-reflections, based on light probes, and suitable for using in real-time scenes. To improve the accuracy of the approximation, the technique takes into account bounding boxes of light probes, usually corresponding to rooms.

In your scene the bounding box for the light probe doesn’t encompass the whole room: part of the room lies outside the bounding box, which makes the reflections in this part inaccurate and stand out from the rest.

Have you tried @jorgearq’s suggestion to extend the light probe bounding box to encompass the room?

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Thanks for the explanation, I will try the single light probe to encompass the whole scene.

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