United3dArtists Archive

VRAY INTERIOR LIGHTING – Level – Medium


In this tutorial I'm gonna show you how (you can made)to achieve a nice interior lighting using few light and settings with the new VRay Render engine from trueSpace 7.11 and above..

Hope you like!!

Let's start.

First you must understand how many kind of lights you must replicate to simulate reality.

1) From the sky dome and exterior
2) From the sun.
3) From the bounces of the any ray of light inside the room

Vray are capable to help you simulate those lights with quality and at incredible render speed.



First we gonna enable the Global Illumination (GI) from the Vray settings panel to get the 1st and 2nd bounces plus the Environment color light..
We gonna select the (Very Low) preset to get a fast preview form what we are doing.

The environment color let you choose the color coming from the sky.
We gonna use the white color for the environment, but if you want you can use a little cyan.


You can see the scene is too dark. And that is because we don't have any source of light with the intensity required to illuminate the interior of the room..

** You can increase the interior intensity using the 1st and 2nd bounces but that will be a subject for following articles

Now we gonna insert the sun light.

In this case we gonna use a directional light with shadows enabled and no falloff with distance.


The light of the sun, have a bit of yellow color. How much yellow?? That’s depend from the hour of the day, the season and other variables..
Putting a little yellow and orange you can find a nice warm effect.

The light direction must be pointing to the windows. That's gonna simulate the sun entering into the room..

Now we gonna make a new render..

Now, we can see the sunlight’s bounces through the room and a bit of GI.

But still to dark..

As you can see the previous render still to dark..
For that, we gonna use the Area light on each window.

You must locate the Area lights ouside the room, in front the window looking to the inside.
They must have the same shape of the window, with a similar size to simulate the lights coming from the outside..

We must enable the shadows with an intensity of 0.3 for each light.
Now we are ready to make another render..


That looks much better..

If you look, are fewer dark shadows. And to help the light bounces we gonna have to add a local light..

The function of this local light is try to light those dark areas, must be located in the center of the room and cannot emit shadows..


The intensity of this light must be very soft.. 0.4 or less, we gonna select the squared falloff..
The distance of that falloff should be the same of the room size..

Now if we make a render, we can see the room has improved its illumination.

With a few touches you can get a pretty interior lighting room.


Increase the InterpSamples to 50 or 60..

And i recommends you, save the GI map because if you need to make a little change you don't need to wait again the GI calculation..

Next step is texturize and Voilá !!

Now you can download this scene and practice (if you want) or burn the room... *The scene doesn't have any lights or textures.. if you need the lights? read again the tutorial
*All the objects on this scene were created by myself for this tutorial and you can use them freely without a problem and for any purpose.

*The image outside the room was made saving the render in TGA file format 32bits with Alpha channel and added in post process..


I hope you like this first tutorial..
Thanks Cobayo for the help!!
Best Regards,
Augusto Michelis