lighting in a 3D environment

After creating the models for my environment and then adding the textures I had decided to add the lighting for the world, at first I experimented by adding a simple skylight and ray tracing shadows, this produced a very nice quality render however it took far too long for a single frame to render so I had decided to find an alternative, at the same time I was wanting to find a way to add a sky to the world. At first I create a simple sphere and then flipped the polygons to show my texture within the world, after adding the light it became very dark within the sphere so the environment could not be seen, in addition the texture wasn’t very effective showing the same pattern over and over on the face map. Unable to find a way around this I decided to find an alternative and added daylight to the environment. This added a global time of day lighting system that allowed me to manipulate just what kind if light I wanted . It produced the same quality of lighting as the ray trace and created rendered images far faster. The daylight system also solved my need to create a sky sphere and drew my attention towards environment settings allowing me to create an entire sky using its settings.

However the insides of buildings far too dark to be seen in final renders. Unable to find a way around this I decided to come up with another way around this problem. After deleting the daylight system completely and replaced it with a series of omni lights and a skylight above the environment. Under the render settings I also modified the advanced lighting option and added light tracer which produced high quality light renders, I also set the number of bounces to two to improve the scene even further.

However renders for a single frame took far longer than the daylight system but allowed me to light the interiors of my buildings. This provided another problem with the indoors being far too bright, so I changed the omni settings to dim after a certain distance and reduced the intensity by 0.2 to create a darker scene to fit with the environment map. So far I have found lighting to be far more difficult than modelling or animating my scene but the most rewarding with it having the most noticeable effects.