Vray lighting & realistic 3d render basics for interior designers

1. 1 Intro Light in interior and in Vray: Hi everyone. My name is Orellan and I work as an interior designer for more than ten years. I'm using Fredis, Max, and V to create my renders and today I would like to share with you my experience of creating photo realistic interiors. And in this course we will talk about a very important, I would say a health of render success. We will talk about lighting, interior design, and V ray. This course is divided into three big parts. And in the first part we will talk about setting up your lights, adjusting and balancing them. That is the key to photo realism in your renders. Everything we see in our images is reflection. I mean, everything is the same like in our reality, we can see objects around us because of reflection. That is actually bringing the shape and the color information to our eyes and we are able to perceive that. Now if we aim to obtain photo realism in our renders, we will have to simulate that in our Pre D software. That's why first we will have to understand what is light, what it means to draw with light. That's actually what we are doing when we create our renders. And we will talk about RGB and how it is linked to V. We must understand lights, features like brightness and gamma. What is the color space and how that links to our camera. By the way, our camera from reality is simulated in VA. And we must understand how to adjust it so we can get the best of it. We must understand the process, how an image is formed. Only in that way we will be able to correct the issues that appear in our draft renders until we bring that to the final render stage that we show to our clients. We will discuss what is an input draw version of the input that we are loading and what is an output? What is a gamma correction? How that interacts between the three factors that we load. Our computer perceives that. And between V ray, the engine that we are using to create our free D render our images. We will talk about exposure, how to balance that, how that is linked to V ray, what is the color mapping, what types we have and what method we use to create our renders. That is crucial to understand. If we aim to balance tones in our image, a good contrast means a good visual, pleasant image. All that will form the first part of our course. In the second part, we will start to learn V ray lights. We must first understand what types of lights we have and how they perform in V ray. We can further understand how to adjust according to interior design rules. We will talk about all the ray lights. We will talk about the ray sun and the ray sky, and all their properties. And we will also talk about one of the key factors of our photorealism. We will talk about HDRIs. This is actually the key to simulate realistic light. And we must understand how they perform and all their properties. When we will balance our light outside, which is the natural light, we'll have to pass to our interior sources, our artificial lights. And as we are talking about interior design, this will actually be a more important part, as if we are talking about exteriors. The outside light is crucial there. But in interiors, the artificial sources are actually what are creating the interior light and design. We must understand how many sources of light we have to use in our reality. Understand how the sources perform in our real spaces, and after that, trying to simulate that in our renders. The biggest problem when we struggle to obtain photo realism is that our lights, interior lights are not set as in reality. There are actually three phases. First, we must set our main lights. We also have to take into account the style and shapes. But in this course we will talk about the adjusting part of our lights. The second phase is adding our hidden lights and decor. Lighting, It must fill up the dark parts. We can identify them by creating light tests. We will talk about that in the first part of our course. In the first phase, it's adjusting according to interior settings. All those lights adjusting their intensity so we don't get, for example, brighter, additional, or hidden lights than our main source interior light. There is no such a thing, like a template with ready numbers of intensity as lights inphdious, Max, and VA do not perform as simple as in reality in style light. And it already works according to all rules physically accurate, we'll have to adjust that. This is our job as interior design creators. That's why if we want to understand how to adjust that, we must first understand how all that lights perform and their properties. We must understand what is light. Temperature. We've always use temperature in interiors. This is another key to photo rails. We will talk about light types. We will take apart radi lights so we can understand how they are constructed and how we can adjust them. Another big problem is that a lot of beginners actually bring ready models, Fredy lights, in the renders. And they expect that they should already work as in reality, install in reality a light source. And that's it, it works in VA. If you seek to obtain photorealism, you'll have to take a few more steps. You'll have to identify the light type, how it emits light in Freds, Max, VA, all the lights belong to one of these three types no matter what lights you are using. That's why we'll have to take apart ready models so we can first understand the principles, how they work. I'll show, by the way, a few examples from a real interior project. But this course is not a three D project. It's more like a technical lesson of the light principles and features that must be understood before getting to real three D projects. Last, the third part will be like a practice part. We will talk about how we implement all these previous knowledge and how we start to link that with real examples. Talk about what is a light test, how we use V light mix to fine tune our lights before our render will face post production in Photoshop. And we will get to the final stage. We will talk about some light effects like Vira lens effect VIAs. And finally, how to set up our final render settings. That's why I invite you all to join this course. It will bring you a full understanding how lights technically work and how to reach photo realise in your renders. Okay, let's get started. 2. 2 What is light?: Light behaves above as a waving, as a particle. Particles are called photons. And they carry a specific amount of energy and they are the gauge of the electromagnetic force. When we create our three enders, we draw with light. You'll say, wait a minute, we use colors even if they are an electronic format that simulates our pencils. Yes, that is true. But everything we see is reflection. I mean, everything reflection is light that actually contains all those colors. If there is no light, there is no reflection. 3. 3 Drawing with light: Light is the key to high quality renders. If we want to obtain a good image, we must understand what is actually drawing with light, or how we call it. In a most simple way, drawing with colors, light divides into color spectrum and vice versa. So in other words, we can say that light contains all those colors, at least those that are capable of being seen by human eye. And all those colors form the light if they are brought together. In this case, we say, we talk about light colors or additive colors, or RGB. Same thing happens with pigment colors, only vice versa. In the second case, we talk about subtractive colors, or CMIK. They can be our pencils, for example, or any kind of color carrier. Rgb and CMK are modes for mixing color and design. Rgb, color mode is the best for digital images. This is our case with V M Preds max. While CMIK is used for print products and will be useful when you print your projects, in this course, we will focus mainly on RGB. 4. 4 RGB and how it is linked with Vray: Rgb, red, green, and blue is the color space for digital images. We use RGB color mode when we create our images inside free DS max using V ray. And not only those images can be viewed on any kind of screen. We will talk about light properties a little bit later. First, I would like to explain some general important moments, so we all understand the core. A light source within a device creates any color you need by mixing red, green, and blue and varying their intensity. This is known as additive mixing. All colors begin as black darkness, and then red, green and blue light is added on top of each other to brighten and create the perfect pigment. When red, green, and blue light is mixed together at equal intensity, they create pure white. Designers can control light aspects like hue saturation and value by modifying any of these three source colors. Because it's done digitally, the designer manipulates how the light on the screen manifests to create the color they want. If we talk about light, then this will be the light color. Some consider white to be a color because the white light comprises all hues and the visible light spectrum. Many do consider black to be a color because you combine other pigments to create it on paper. But in a technical sense, black and white are not colors. They are shades. They augment colors. White light contains all the wavelengths of the visible spectrum. So when the color white is being reflected, that means all the wavelengths are being reflected and none of them absorbed making white the most reflective color. 5. 5 Brightness vs Gamma: Previously we talked about the fact that when we create our images, we draw with light. Well, if we can assume that the image has something represented on it, then we can say that there is at least a little bit of light that creates some reflection. And our eyes perceive that reflection and we begin to see what is represented on our image. Because without light, we wouldn't be able to see anything next. If we go further, we can say that if there is a source of light, we can define a level of brightness. So there are three major points we have to consider. First, brightness is overall luminosity. Second, contrast is the difference in luminosity between two points or between two shades formed by reflection of the light source. And the third is gamma, that is an actual change in intensity of that luminosity. Gamma 2.2 has been the standard for Windows and Apple. We will use that standard for our images. Using a monitor with a gamma level of 2.2 can produce almost optimal colors. This level provides the optimal balance for true color, and it is used for the standard for graphics and video by professionals. When the gamma is too high, the image looks much darker. The details in the dark areas of the image are completely lost. The black and white on the image aren't affected by the high gamma, but the colors are completely changed. The image might even look richer due to the enhanced contrast. In the next lesson, we will try to define what is gamma and how gamma works. 6. 6 Vray as your render engine: Next we will set up V ray as our renderer. When you install V ray, this bar will appear, we will set it here. Next we will go to Render Set Up. If you can see we have here standard max scan line. We must switch to V. We go to a sign Render, and we choose Vra from this list. Next we will press Save us Defaults, and we will use further V for our images. 7. 7 sRGB: Now let's talk about how RGB links to the ray. Let's start from the beginning. What is the color space? Anyway? It is just the range of the colors that are available to your camera. The ones generally used in the digital world are some form of RGB color spaces, which stands for red, green, and blue. That means that all the colors in that space are created by some combination of those three colors. Your camera will default to SRGB if you haven't given the setting any thought, that is what you are using. This is a color space jointly created by HP and Microsoft back in 1996. Pretty much everything on a computer is built around RGB. Therefore, if you are posting a picture online, it will be RGB. Always using SRGB is pretty safe option. You'll face the same question over color space. In your post processing, you can set up Photoshop and light room to process your photos in SRGB or a Dube RGB. In fact, if you are shooting raw and you should be, this will be where you actually assign the color space in the first place. When you take a raw file, the camera captures all the colors it can, and no color profile is assigned. Instead, you do that in Photoshop or light room. There are other color spaces options available as well. But for simplicity, we would use the same option we picked for our camera. Rgb uses the range 0-1 if we are talking about computer graphics, or 0-255 if we are talking about Web. In that way, it identifies a color within RGB color space. The transfer function between RGB and color on the screen, it's non linear and it's often related to gamma. For our images, we will use gamma 2.2 The SRGB color space is composed of a specific amount of color information. This data is used to optimize and streamline colors between devices and technical platforms such as computer screens, printers, and web browsers. Each color within the SRGB color space provides the possibility of variation of that color. That's why for this we will use color mapping. Here, we can use in hard or exponential. I'm using exponential as I'm doing my post production later in Photoshop. In conclusion, your option is just to stick with SRGB. It is safe and you will never have problems with color compression if you post most of all your photos online. This is probably the best choice, even when it comes to printing. It will do a fine job and you will probably never notice any difference. 8. 8 Input Output and enable Gamma: In this lesson, I'd like to talk about input and output so we can understand how gamma works in Preds, Max and Vira. In general, input and output is the communication between an information processing system and the outside world. Inputs are the signals or data received from the system, and outputs are the signals and data sent from it. For instance, a keyboard or computer. Mouse is an input device for a computer, while monitors and printers are the output devices. In our case, as we are using Vra to create images, input is the data and the textures we are loading inside free DS max to create our virtual scene. The output is the image itself or our render that we are usually showing to our clients. In early versions of V, input and output, gamma values for free. Ds max and Vra were linear, or we can say that the value was one by default. In order to get the three D visualizations that look right, they need to be brought to gamma 2.2 or rather to say the rendering software had to be taken into account for gamma correction, especially when working with Rester or our textures or our render output. Later, it became clear to many software developers that Gamma 2.2 should be defaulted to three D rendering programs including three DS, max and V. In the later versions, Cama 2.2 had become a default value V. Developers have also adapted to this. In order for our gamma correction to work, we have to use these following three steps. First of all, the customize and preferences gamma and LUT. We have to change the gamma to 2.2 this will set the correct gamma 2.24 hour display mode in pre DS max. Also, we have to enable the crack display for our V ray materials in the material editor. The second step is the enable of V ray frame her. We have to check that it's on so we can see the results of gamma changing. The third step will be to check the gamma 2.2 at the color mapping in the V ray. Don't forget we are using for our renders no gamma 9. 9 What is Gamma?: In this lesson, I would like to talk about gamma if we want to understand how light works. First, we have to define the major factors that influence the light appearance in our images. The biggest overall factor is gamma. Gamma, previously in all the monitors, was directly linked to voltage and was an important factor that reproduced image accurately on display in current LCD monitors. Gamma can be thought of as the moderator of the relationship between the brightness of the data captured, or we call it input, and how that affects the total human eye perception of the color. We call it output. And all the while viewing our display in terms of color brightness. In a more technical sense, it is the correction of the brightness in an images color through the color shading balance. And pixels value, pixels have values that range between zero or black to 255, which is white with various degrees of gray in between our normal vision, Not excessively dark or exceedingly bright conditions is more sensitive to changes in dark tones. And due to that, the capture process of an image color can be misrepresented as a result of the difference in how we perceive the brightness and the illuminance from when the original image was captured. Our eyes capture brightness in a disproportional way. For example, if a camera captures an image in an extremely bright setting, our eyes perceive the light as being only a fraction brighter. If the image is displayed on a desktop without a gamma correction, it will be then perceived by the user as being washed out or too bright due to the imbalance. Gamma is used to ensure the input relationship matches the desktop output. When applying this range to color, RGB colors can be produced at various brightness levels while not affecting the color hue. So in this case, gamma correction is needed to adjust images in response to the properties of the human vision in order to produce true color. So in conclusion, we can say that gamma is used for smooth gradation between colors and color correction. Also, it improves and produce higher quality, more precise color output. 10. 10 Exposure vs Gamma: Exposure is one of the most fundamental photography terms. When you take a picture, you press the shutter button to open the camera's aperture and the light streams. In triggering a response from a sensor, exposure is the amount of light that reaches your camera sensor, creating the visual data over a period of time. In other words, our future image, the time period could be fractions of a second or entire hours. The right exposure is a balancing act. Overexposure leads to overexposed high lights and faded looking images. Underexposed images are dark and hard to see. After we snap a photo, cameras have a small LCD screen that gives us a preview of the photo we just took. In the small preview, we are not able to tell if an image is properly exposed. Because of that, cameras can show us a graphical representation of the exposure data known as a histogram. Histogram is a graph that measures the brightness of an image by representing the frequency of each tone as a value. On a bar chart, the horizontal axis moves from pure black on the left side of the histogram through shadows, mid tones, and high lights, all the way to the brightest white on the right side. The vertical axis represents the frequency or intensity of each tone, with peaks for high frequency and values for low. Most digital cameras have both luminosity histogram, measuring the total brightness and the color histogram, measuring the intensity of RGB of red, green, and blue tones. If we see high frequency tones or peaks running off the left side of our histogram, that means that our blacks are being clipped and our camera is not picking up all the shadow detail that it might, this type of low key image might be what we are going for, but if it isn't, we can let more light. In. Vice versa, if our image is high key, we might expect picks on the right side of our histogram. But if those picks are cut off at the right edge, the image may be overexposed, meaning that the high light detail is washed out. And in this case, we must take a shorter exposure. The main fact is that the histogram can help us in post processing, and it is the key to obtain good looking images. If our shadow is eclipsed, we will see that on our histogram from the left side and we will enhance the details in our dark areas. If our highlights are being clipped, we will see that on our histogram from the right side. And we will adjust to enhance the details in our bright areas. Depending on what we have on our image, we can adjust exposure or contrast as needed. Over and under, exposed images contain less data, which means that there is less room to make a change. Getting the perfect exposure is a mix of our editing style and our commitment to practice. We define what is exposure and in the next lessons, we will try to understand how to apply and link it to Priddis Max V. 11. 11 Gamma vs Exposure in Vray: In this lesson, I'd like to talk a bit about output, or what we actually see on our screens. How the previous things we've talked about, colors and light, connect to V ray. I will load a simple thing. I will open the Material Editor. Here we have Frida's Mac Standard Material. We will change that to V Material. When we load the Simple Ray material, its color is a mid gray, defined by the colors of RGB. Here we have RGB colors. Here we have red, green, and blue hue saturation, and value is another form of representing color. But for now, we will talk about RGB. As you can see here we have the values for our RGB, and here we have the brightness, although it's written whiteness or we call it brightness or luminance zero, it's black, 255 for all it's white. We can choose any color. This will be the color for our simple V material. And here you can see the RGB inputs for the code of this color. I will open the V ray frame buffer. Here you can see written raw, It signifies whether color and display corrections are applied or not when showing the sample pixel values at the current mouse point of position. For now, by default if you can see, we are using RGB, Although later we will turn to light mix further. I'd like to show a quick example so you can understand and see how gamma works. We'll create a box and a teapot. I'll need a source of light. Of course we are using V. We will talk about light properties later. The render as dark as we don't have a source light, we will add one a V light. I will use the interative render so we can see life. What is happening if you can see our image looks very bright here interferes what we talked about in the previous lesson about color representation mismatch. Now we have two options. We adjust the light, or we can adjust the exposure. In the upper right, you can see a stack of layers like in Photoshop. The lowest one says the source is RGB, and the upper one applies over it, as they are only to active, and it is called display correction. Now when we click on that layer to activate it, we can see that we are using RGB space low. We have the exposure. We will use a more advanced method, we will talk about it later. For now, I would like to point out a very important rollout, color mapping. We will talk about it in the next lesson. I'll switch to expert, so we can see all the options you can see. Here we are using gamma 2.2 for our images. Like a color correction. Here we have to point out three things, linear, multiply, exponential, and Reinhart. Also, we have to know that we are using no gamma for now. In the next lessons, we will talk about all these things so we can get the whole image and understand how we can solve the light problems in our images. 12. 12 Color mapping: Let's talk about color mapping. Color mapping, sometimes also called tone mapping, dictates which color operations are performed between user interface inputs. Or we call it simply input. And the values rendered and the way the rendered pixels are displayed through our V ray frame buffer on our monitor, or we call them simply output. Linear. Exponential and Reinhart are the main types of mapping, our image or our render. We use them from color mapping rollout. And before we get into color mapping, we will try to define those three types and understand the main action they provide. Linear multiply, simply multiplies the final image colors based on their brightness without applying any changes. This setting ensures one to one mapping of all the user operations and the final result. For example, doubling alights intensity exactly doubles its contribution to the final pixel. And cutting alights reflectance in a half cuts its contribution to the final pixel in a half. The settings might be desirable for artistic purposes, but this will create over enhanced contrast and will usually pull away from physical accuracy of our render or our image. The next one, exponential, saturates the colors based on their brightness. This can be useful in preventing burnouts in very bright areas. For example, around light sources. This mode clams colors so that no value exceeds 255 if we are talking about RGB or one in a floating point values if we are talking about computer graphics. And the third one, Reinhart, is a blend between the first two, linear and exponential. The degree to which one method or another is applied to the image is specified by the burn value parameter. Now you'll ask, what should I choose? Well, before we choose one of those three modes, we must choose the method that we will use to adjust or retouch our render. There are two methods, first using V ray tools inside freds max and the second one is Photoshop. Not only but usually I use second method later post production in Photoshop. That's why I'm using exponential. It's a very close like using raw. With further retouching, I found it to be better as I'm getting a lot more flexibility while I'm doing my post processing of the final image. Let's finish with color mapping. There are two functions that I think we have to define as well. In older versions of VA, this option was always assumed to be enabled. However, it is disabled in new versions as this produces more correct renderings, especially when using universal settings approach effect background. When disabled, color mapping does not affect colors belonging to the background. The last thing we have to point out is the color mapping only with no gamma, we will use that always. This tells VA that only color mapping is burned into the final image and not gamma correction. In conclusion I'm using exponential with default settings and no gamma folk color mapping. And if you intend to do your post processing and Photoshop, you should stick to this option. 13. 13 Good light good render: A good light is the key to a good quality render. A good lighting is an important part of any project. Lighting is a combination of techniques that are used to project light in a freed environment. And also light plays a key role in rendering, in making things look believable and realistic. Interior designers, and not only use light to enhance the atmosphere, tone, depth, and mood of a scene. While there are many things that influence the quality of render materials, textures, and a lot more, lighting is something that must be set upright and balanced to achieve the look that we want. If we want to set up the realistic lighting in our interior scenes, we have to learn first the properties of light. And then we have to simulate light looks and intensity like in reality. In the next lessons, we will first take a look at basic vira, light properties. 14. 14 Vray light properties: In this lesson, I would like to talk about ray light properties. First, we have to check that V set as our renderer. If we press render, we see a black screen as there is no light in our scene yet. First of all, I'd like to explain the logic of light in Phidias Max. And not only, but we will talk about Max. I'll create a sphere. This sphere will be our world. The zero point that you see in the center is the center of our world. Lighting divides into exterior and interior. And the exterior lighting is very alike like this sphere, or we can say that it's like the sun and our sky that are inverted. And they illuminate everything inside that sphere max, in general. And not only acts like this sphere, in other words, we can say that we find ourselves always inside a big sphere. Now I'll create a teapot. We will test the lights on this teapot. I will add some quality. I will use a plane, a ray plane. It's an infinite plane. As you see, our screen is black as we don't have any lights at this moment in our scene. We have to go to lights roll out, have to choose V Ray. We have four types of lights. First, we will talk about the ray lights. You can find these lights in this quick rollout as well. There are two more things that I would like to show in this rollout. This is the camera that we will use and the light lister. It's like a general panel from where we can control all the lights in our scene. At the moment we have no lights, it's empty. Let's create a light, a simple Vray light, and we will look at its properties. As you can see, ray light divides into five types. We have plane, dome, sphere mesh, and disc. You can also find them here in this quick rollout. Let's begin with a plane. Let's open our renderer set up. In our case, this is V ray, we will use interactive render. This is like a quick preview. As you can see, the screen is black as we said, as there are no lights yet. Let's create a light. As I said, I will choose plane. Our plane is still at zero point. I'll level up. We begin to see the effect of our first light in our scene. At this moment, we can say that our sphere is cut into two equal pieces. And we find ourselves in the upper piece, or above the zero level. The intensity of the light is still too high. And around we have darkness. We will talk about that. Let's begin with the light types. First one plane, it's one of the most used lights, is just a simple rectangle that illuminates on one side. We can set two sides as well, and also we can control its sides. A very important rule, we scale our lights. The second one is Dom. It's like a half of a sphere that eliminates from everywhere. I'll bring down our intensity so we can see its effect. It's like a half of the sky. Next one is fear, we can control the radius. Next one is mesh. It is used to create different shapes of lights from mesh or from geometry or our objects. I'll show in a second. The last one is disc. It's very alike like plane only has a circle shape. I would like to show how mesh works. We have to pick a object and we can transform this object into a light source. For example, this could be a light bulb. We can control its intensity and other properties as well. Now let's talk about light properties. These are the general properties. I'll switch back to a plane. As I said, it's one of the most used types. And let's analyze the general properties we can turn on and off our light. We can switch its type. We can make a target type light or a free light. We can control its size. As I said, we are not scaling our lights when we begin a project. We have to choose the units that we will work with and we can give our lights exact dimensions. In this list, you can see different types of controlling our intensity. For now, we will stick with default. You may say, I would like to create a light that simulates the same intensity from reality. Well Max, it's very close but it doesn't act like this. There are a lot of factors that influence the lights and the scene. We will talk about some of them in this course. We are using multiplier to adjust the intensity of our lights. Here we have the color, we can change the color of our lights. I'll switch to different types of control and intensity just to visualize how they work. But as I said, we will stick to default. As I said, we are using multiplier to control the intensity of lights in our scene. We can define a light color using two methods. We can use color as simple color, or we can use temperature. In interior design, we are mainly using temperature. We will talk about temperature in a few lessons. This is one of the main features of lights, and it is the key to obtain realism in our renders. We will talk about it in a few lessons. The last feature is texture. We can use a texture to create a colorful light using the colors from the texture. But it's a more artistic approach, I guess. But in interior scenes, we will focus mainly on simulating real world lights. The next roll out controls the angle of light. The exclude is used to control the illumination of a specific object or objects, and we can exclude them from being illuminated or casting shadows. In interior design, we are mainly not using this feature. This is a more artistic approach. As I said, like the texture one, I'll have to switch to render so we can see the effect. For example, if we want to exclude the shadows of an object. But as I said, this is a more artistic tool. We are not using it often in interior design. Let's go further. The next one is double sided. We can enable the other side of rectangle invisible. It is used to hide lights. It is very often used in interior design, especially when we have to get rid of reflections on other objects. And when we have to hide the light source from where the light is coming. For example, like a hidden light used to exclude fall off of a light ray. Lights by default use a physical correct appearance. A fall off is a natural feature of any light and we can turn that on and off. The sky light portal will give us the same elimination that we will get from the sun, sky light only, but we will not use this feature. I will also skip store with irradiance map. We don't need that function for now. The last three functions, they are acting somehow similar. We use them to control how lights affect our diffuse specular and reflections. Effect. Reflections is the most used one from these three features. In order to see the effect, we have to create a V material. We also have to enable reflections for our material. These were the basic Vralight properties. We will use them later to understand the construction of realistic light sources. And how we can use them to adjust the sources in order to create realistic images. Next, we will talk about Vira Sun. 15. 15 Vray Sun Sky part 1: Next I'd like to talk about the sun and sky, how we use them, and how they interact in interior design and interior scenes. In order to understand how to set up the lighting for an interior scene, we must understand how sun and sky work. I will model a simple room and I will try to explain the features of the sun and how it behaves inside our interiors and outside our interiors, or we call them exteriors. Sun and sky are special features which are provided by Vray Renderer, developed to work together very sun and V sky reproduce the real life sun and sky environment of the Earth. Both are coded so that they change their appearance depending on the direction of sun. I'll show that in a minute. Let's model the windows. We will have three windows and the light will get through these windows in our scene. We still have a dark environment as there is no sun or sky. Our apply shall modifier so we can thicken our walls. I'll move the teapot inside our room and the light as well As you can see we have a dark environment now and the only light is the previous source plane. This is the night scene for interior when we use only artificial lights. And outside as you see, we have darkness, complete darkness. If we want to model a day light interior, we have to add the sun. First of all, I would like to add a V ray material to our walls. We have only ray materials in our scene. Now let's go to our V lights. We will choose next source S. I'll target our sun towards our interior. Also, we are asked if we want to add a Verray sky that is linked to our V Sun. We press okay. We accept. In the next lesson we will talk about HDRI. This is a more complex type of sky, but for now, let's talk about our simple very sky. As you can see, we have too much light outside. And we will need another tool, a physical camera, so we can balance our light. First of all, if you can see we are above our V ray plane. Somehow we can say that we are above the ground. This is what we see in our render if our V ray sun and ray sky are set up outside. Also our artificial lights inside our interior are turned on. I'll raise the sun somewhere 30 or 40 degrees towards the Earth, depending of its position towards the Earth and the angle the overall light appearance changes in our scenes. As you can see, we still have overbrights in our scenes. We will change that in a minute. Outside we have too much light now. It's time to balance that. I'll use a physical camera. First of all, I would like to show how a physical camera acts outside. It's a simulation of a real camera from reality. I'll bring the camera in, our interior. Now as you can see, our light is balanced. I'll pull the light outside so we can see only the effect of the sun. And also I'll get a little closer to our Ti pot. Our tip pot represents any interior object or objects that will be set in our scenes. This is the principle how we create interiors. The shadows also are created automatically. Now let's see how camera acts outside and how it interacts with the sun itself. As you can see, we have a daylight. I'll bring the sun down so you can see the effect. As we lower our sun, we begin to see a sunrise or a sunset and vice versa. If we bring it up, we increase the daylight. Next, I'll bring our teapot outside so we can see how objects interact outside using a physical camera. And this is the principle, how we create exteriors. So as you can see, very camera balances the light also outside and inside. This is how our interior look and our exterior as well. Inside. Of course, we need some artificial lights if we want to get a right balanced light. And as you can see, it's too dark because of the lack of that light. 16. 16 Vray Sun Sky part 2: I'll set up our camera so that we can see a piece of our room and the sun as well. These are the options or parameters of our sun. Let's get a quick wheel. The first one enabled turns on and off the sunlight intensity multiplier. It's an intensity multiplier for the ray sun. Since the sun is very bright, by default, we can use this parameter to reduce its effect. I'll lower the sun a bit so we can better see this effect. Next one, the size multiplier controls the visible size of the sun. This affects the appearance of the sun disc as seen by the camera and reflections, as well as the blurrness of the sun shadows. Next, filter color changes the color of the sun and depends on the color mode parameter. This mode belongs to artistic approach and we won't use this in our interior and exterior scenes. Filter shifts the hue of the sun and ray sky system towards the color specified in the filter color field. Direct sets the color of sun to match the color in the filter color parameter. In this case, the intensity of the light does not depend on ray sun's position. It is controlled through the intensity multiplier and override says the color of V Sun to match the color in the filter color parameter. But the intensity of the light still depends on the sun's position in the sky. Sky model specifies what model is used to generate the V sky texture. Also an artrostic tool, we won't use this next one changes the color of the ground. Indirect horizon illumination specifies the intensity of the illumination on horizontal surfaces coming from the sky blend angle controls the size of the gradient formed by vary sky between the horizon and the actual sky. Horizon offset offsets the horizon from the default position. Durability determines the amount of dust in the air and affects the color of the sun and the sky. Last, ozone affects the color of the sunlight. All these are artistic effects and artistic tools. We won't use them in interior and exterior exclude works the same as exclude from a simple very light. It excludes objects from elimination or shadow casting of the sunlight. Invisible when enabled, makes the sun invisible both to the camera and reflections effect. Diffuse determines if the sun is affecting the diffuse properties of the materials effect. Specular determines whether the sun is affecting the specular of the materials and cast atmospheric shadows. When enabled that atmospheric effects in the scene cast shadows. The last two sampling shadow bias moves the shadow toward or away from the shadow casting object or object. Photoimit radius determines the radius of the area where the photons would be shut. In conclusion, we can say that we will stick with the defaults of the sun and sky. All these parameters are artistic tools and we won't need them in our exteriors and interiors, but we mainly talk about interiors. In the next lesson, we will talk about HDRIs. This is the key to light realism in our scenes. 17. 17 HDRI part 1: In this lesson, I'd like to talk about a very important source of light, HDRI, which is actually the key to realism in our interior scenes. And not only we are mainly focused on interior design in this course and I'll try to explain in a simple way the principles for interior design. But as this is an exterior type of light that we are trying to bring in our interiors. We will talk of course, about exterior principles as well. I won't get too much into technical details how HDRIs are obtained. Shortly we can say that it's a three D image, that it's unwrapped in two D format. And then in Preds Max, we wrapped it up on our environment that we will talk about in a second or on sphere that we talked about in the previous lessons. One more thing that I would like to add, why actually HDRIs looks so realistic. As you can see in the image we capture our fred environment from reality. Before we get to HDRIs, I would like to talk a bit about simple environment and free DSX. Let's open our file. This is our previous file. I'll start interactive render. This is where we stopped when we talked about the sun. Now in rendering we have environment, or we can press eight. As you can see here we have the default V ray sky. This is an environment map. If I will turn off our map, we will have darkness around, but still as you can see, we have a bit of light that is coming from our sun. First of all, I would like to lock our camera so we can see only the camera view. As we are navigating through our windows, there is the light that comes from our sun. I'll turn the camera so we can see it better. As you can see, our sky is dark, completely dark as we turned off. As I said, our sky but still the sun is still emitting light towards our interior. The next thing I'd like to do, I will turn on our sky. I will turn off our sun. We can see the difference. We are having two source of light, the sky. It's actually our environment at this moment. We can use even a simple color for our environment, but we won't do that. Instead, we will always use HD for our environment, for our scenes. Now, I would like to hide our plane so we can better see how our environment or our V ray sky looks. I will turn it on and as you can see, the health of our sphere is gray beneath the horizon. This is the horizon. This is what we see when we are moving up and down. Next thing I would like to do, I'll choose a very light. I'll clear the environment and we will use a dome. We talked a little bit about it in the very light properties. When I am applying the very me, I say it's like a health of the sky or it's very light like our environment. The light is coming from everywhere. We still have too much light in our scene. As you can see, our environment is empty. This is what we see if we are looking through our camera. It's like an uniform color. I'll change the multiplier so we can have a middle intensity. As you can see, we are seeing a uniform color overall. Yes, it's emitting light, but still it's uniform color, it doesn't look so realistic. Still, this is the beginning for our principles. If we want to understand how HDRIs work in this case, we can say that this is the simple Vra environment. In the next part, we will analyze how we apply A V HDI and how we can manage it. 18. 18 HDRI part 2: Now let's get to our HDI where we can see no map. We will load our HDI. First of all, if you can see here we have power V sky in five. We are using V bit map to load our HDI. In previous versions we are using directly HDI. I'll choose a HDI image. It's an LA Sunset. First I'd like to show how it looks. As I said, it's a Fredy image and it's emitting light from everywhere. There is our son and we must not forget that we have another son. I'll talk about this in a second. I'll choose the sample and I'll copy this V Ray bit map into materials we can get access to HDRI controls. This is our HDRI that you are actually seeing here. We are always using spherical. These are two options I'll show in a bit, rotation and flipping. We will also use Render Multiplier to adjust the intensity of our HDRI. I'll also copy instance in our environment so you'll C Y in a second. This is our sun. I can control the intensity from the ray, light properties, but we will do this in another way. I'll show in a second. I'll close this. Let's say this is our interior. Will unhide our plane so we can get a feeling of our ground. I'll bring the camera closer to our interior. This is the simple principles, how exteriors are created. This is a sunset, but it's not necessarily to be a sunset. We can have a daylight, we can have a night light, we can rotate the position of our son. You can do that vertically, but we won't do that. We can flip, but we won't do that as well. Only option that we will need, it's our horizontal rotation. So we can get the position of our sun. In our case, if these are the windows, we will need our sun to emit light in our interior. As you can see, I turned off our initial sun. That light is actually coming from our very HD. Here in render multiplier, we can pump up our intensity until we obtain a good look or a medium intensity depending on what we are targeting. I'll actually copy a camera so we can see what we are seeing from our interior. It's too high. This is actually what we are seeing in our interiors. As you can see, yes, there is a bit of light. We still can see our objects. In this case, this is our teapot. But as you can see, we still have a lack of light. We need artificial lights to increase our intensity in our interiors, but the light from outside creates somehow a realistic appearance of our objects in our scene. We can leave HDRIs at their normal intensity. It's up to you, and you can increase the intensity using artificial lights. We will talk about artificial lights later in this course. I would like to go to Views and turn on the environment so I can see our HDI and I can see the Sun. That is actually the brightest source of light. From this image, I'll turn my HD right until I see the Sun. It may have a delay. It's okay. There is our sun. It's very like like we set up our sun in the previous lesson when we brought our light inside our interior through our windows. Only difference that HD arise are more realistic than our initial sun. Now we need to increase our intensity. This is one way to do it. We have almost enough light inside our interiors, but we got a very bright exterior, not realistic. We have to balance our light outside and also inside so we can get a realistic appearance of our scene. I'll change HDRI from sunset to daylight. And as you can see, as the image is brighter, we have a lot more light in our scene, balancing light. It's actually the art to create realism and how you feel the intensity of this light and how you apply this intensity inside your images. Our job as Fred artists is to do this at a more realistic appearance of an individual approach, but still the principles are very alike. We've got delays while rotating it happens, I'll try to find the brightest part. So our sun is hidden towards our windows. I guess this is one of the brightest parts are very close. Now I'll bring a bit our intensity up. We must avoid the overbrights outside. There is a simple technique, we can pump up power intensity in our scenes and use curtains, But this is not as real as it would be if we are balancing right our light. This method is used for fast rendering. It's not so accurate, but it's very close. So we have to keep the balance between our exterior and interior, or outside and inside. We must not forget that each is not enough for our interiors. I'll bring a teapot outside so you can actually see how it interacts with light outside and the camera as well. As you can see we have almost perfect light outside. I'll bring back to default to one our HDRI, but it's still a bit dark. You can play with the intensity until you find the perfect balance of light. This is actually the principle, how we set up exterior part for our interiors and also for exteriors of course. But we are talking about interiors. In the next lessons, I would like to talk about artificial lights that are actually the main source of light in our interiors. And we will try to divide them and see how they work and apply in our scenes. 19. 19 Artificial lights introduction: Before we start, I would like to begin with a disclaimer. The idea that you provide in your interior render is the most important thing that creates a realistic and interesting work. Light properties and render settings are now at a level where they are almost automated. We must use, of course, professional Fred models and professional realistic materials. This is very important. But your interior realism results depends on style, understanding, technical interior knowledge, art level, proportion and scale, feeling, color balance, and the main idea that you provide in your work, interior design in a technical way, it's not so complicated. I mean the brushes as I call them, the settings and the functions inside free S max and we really need to know to create a free D render and show your interior ideas. You can learn them in a few months. But people have trouble not in applying brushes, but in creating the main idea of the interior so it matches the client's needs and preferences. In the second part of the course, I would like to give you some tips, how to get closer in a technical approach to deliver an interior idea. As I said earlier, I will give you only the tools and the setups. The idea itself is always individual and this makes you different and unique among other designers. In order to obtain an interior atmosphere in our render, we have to create the outside environment. In previous lessons we talked about V ray light properties. First of all, we need all these to understand how we can manage a light before we obtain a realistic result in our renders. The idea is that we use HDI outside to create the environment and the mood. But as you saw in the practice examples, the light coming from outside, it is not enough. We must add artificial lights in our interior to obtain a balanced light. There are three main objectives that we will target. Further, we need to understand the concept of light color and the light temperature. And what type of color is better to use in a specific interior. Second, we need to talk about artificial light types or categories from reality to understand what we must choose for our interiors. And three, we will try to apply a few of those light types in our practice examples, so you can see how to adjust them and how to obtain a balanced light. As I said, every room or space is different, so we have to adjust. There is no such a thing like golden formula that works for every scene. When you understand the basic principles further, it's your job as an artist to obtain a realistic appearance. This is individual approach. But first, let's begin with the basic tips. After you understand them, you will be able to apply these adjustments in your work. First one is the light color, or light temperature. 20. 20 Temperature or light color: When we try to simulate real world lights, we must use a physical correct input. So we get the same result as in our interior scenes as we use artificial lights, mainly in interiors color. Temperature is a way to describe the light appearance provided by a light bulb. It is measured in degrees of Kelvin on a scale 1000-10 thousand. Typically, Kelvin temperatures for commercial and residential lighting applications fall somewhere on a scale from 2000 Kelvins to 6,500 Calvins. Color temperatures over 5,000 are called cool colors or bluish colors, while lower color temperatures around 3,000 are called warm colors or yellowish. Warm in this context is an analogy to radiated heat flocks of traditional incandescent lighting rather than temperature. Understanding the temperature scale will help us to choose the best color of light for our interior scenes. Warm light colors. Light produced in 2,000.3 thousand K range of the light color temperature is called warm, white, red and yellow hues are more flattering to skin tones and clothing, which is why these temperatures are very popular in spaces like livings. Also color temperature bulbs with warm color are standard for bedrooms to create atmosphere. If we move a bit up to a soft white, which is slightly above 3,000 K color temperature or higher for areas that require more visual tasks like kitchen, home office, laundry room and bathroom. In the spaces where warmth and relaxation are not a priority, increased to a cooler color temperature. It's more for clarity. Cool light colors, blues are considered cool, and they live at the higher end of the Kelvin scale. Cool light produces more contrast, so it's preferred for task lighting in a bathroom, vanity, or kitchen. If usual, white light is important for our atmosphere, we look for color temperatures between 3,000 K and 4,500 K. These range from cool white to bright white. With higher temperatures start to show a slightly blue tint. We must consider that these temperatures are brighter, offering a cleaner look than warm temperatures. And colors above 7,000 K are more for technical purposes like residential, outdoor lighting, security lighting. And in conclusion, we can say that we focus for our interiors in the range of 3,000 K and 6,500 K. In the next lessons, we will talk about light types. We will also try to analyze a few three D models, how they work in V Ray, we can understand the structure and how we can manage them and adjust them for our interior. 21. 21 Light types: In the 19th century, the first practical incandescent lamp was invented by Thomas Edison and Joseph Swan. Since then, there has been significant improvement in different types of bulbs and their efficiencies. There are different types of lights and they all are designed with the conceived image in mind. Major types of lights or bulbs are commonly found in the lighting system of homes, offices, markets, factories, et cetera. The performance of a light fixture depends on the bulb we use. And the different types of light bulbs produce different lighting effects. A lamp produces light by the flow of electricity and its general form of artificial lighting. We will try to analyze the types of lights that you see, but we will mainly focus on those who are common for interior design. The first type and the most common are incandescent lamps. Incandescent lights. Incandescent bulbs are standard bulbs, and many people are quite familiar with these bulbs. They are available in a broad range of sizes and voltages, and the bulb glows and produces heat when electricity passes through the filament present inside the bulb. They are being gradually replaced by leads and fluorescent lamps. When the bulb is switched on, the electricity turn the heat up in the filament and the filament glows. Incandescent bulbs can last for 700 up to 1,000 hours and can also be used with a dimer compact fluorescent lamp. A compact thoracent lamp is a modern type of a light bulb that perks like a thescent lamp, It contains mercury, which causes difficulties to its disposal. And it is designed to replace an incandescent lamp. Generally, they use less power, produce same amount of light, and have long lifespan. Most of the compact threescent lamps consist of two or three tubular loops. Sometimes they even look quite similar to incandescent bulbs. These lamps cannot be used with dimers, and usually they can last up to 10,000 hours. Helogen lamps. A Helogen lamp consists of a tungsten filament, which is sealed with a compact, transparent, enveloped, and filled with the inner gas and small amount of halogen. These lamps are smaller than the conventional lamps, and halogen increases the lifetime and brightness of these lamps. Metal held lamps. Metal held lamps consists of a discharge tube or arc tube within a bulb. This tube can be made from either ceramic or quartz and contains mercury salts and starting gas. These types of lamps produce a great amount of light for their size, and these lamps are one of the most efficient lamps. These lamps are most commonly used in halls, traffic lights, on stages, in outdoor lighting systems, and for commercial purposes. Light emitting diet. Lead lamp is an electrical component that emits light through the movement of electrons in a semiconductor device. It lacks a filament, uses less power, and has a long lifespan. Leads produce more light than incandescent lamps and help save energy in energy. Conserving devices leads are usually assembled into a light bulb to be used as a lead lighting system. These diets can emit light of an intended color without the use of the color filters. The initial cost of a lead is generally high, and it is often used in interior design. Fluorescent tube. A fluorescent tube is a gas discharge tube that uses fluorescence to produce visible light. Compared with the incandescent bulbs, fluorescent tubes use less power for the same amount of light. And they are usually more complex and expensive than the incandescent lamps. Fluorescent lamps do not have a good color representation ability, but these tubes are cool in appearance and color. Fluorescent tubes can be used in many places around home, but cannot be used with dimers. Neon lamps. A Neon lamp is a gas discharged lamp that contains gas at a low pressure. It is assembled by mounting to electrodes within a small glass envelope. Standard brightness bulbs are filled with an argon or neon gas mixture. And high brightness lamps are filled with a pure neon gas. When a voltage is applied, then the gas ionizes and starts to glow, allowing a very small current to travel from one electrode to other electrode. Once the gas ionizes, the operation of the lamp can be maintained. At a lower voltage, High intensity discharge lamps, metal hit mercury vapor. Self ballasted mercury lamps and high pressure sodium lamps, all are high intensity discharge lamps. These lamps are specially designed with inner glass tubes and include electrodes with electrical arc. This inner glass tube is filled with both metals and gas. These lamps produce a large quantity of light compared to the fluorescent and incandescent lamps. Intensity discharge lamps are normally used when high levels of light are required over large areas, such as outdoor activity areas, large public areas, pathways, roadways, parking lots, and so on. In the next lessons, we will try to analyze a few of these light types and how they work in. 22. 22 Artificial lights properties: Let's talk about artificial lights and how they work in interior. First of all, I would like to point out a very important thing. This is not a project. This is just a simple exercise or simple practice, and all the objects may be out of scale and out of proportion. The idea of this part is to understand the principles of how interior lights work. I'll attach a few lessons from other course where I designed projects. But again, this will be done only just to simplify the understanding of the principles that we need to learn in interior design. This course is made for beginners and we will talk here about the basic principles of the light in interior design. And the fact that I attached some lessons from other course was done only just to simplify the task and not to model everything from scratch. In the previous lesson, we talked about light types from reality. And in the next lessons, I'll try to show how those lights apply in interior. We will take them apart in order to understand how they are constructed. We will try to understand the principles, how we control them in VA and how we balance light inside our interior scenes. 23. 23 Artificial interior lights, light bulbs: Let's open our previous scene. We will continue further outside. We have our HDRI. I will bring a light this slide. First, we will talk about light bulbs in general. All the lighting in the ray is based on three types of lights. We will take apart this light bulbs so you can see further how it's constructed. This will give you the understanding of how to control this light type inside our interiors. As you can see our interior, it's out of scale. A bit out of scale. And our light is just too small for this interior. As I said earlier, we're not making an interior project. We are making just a simple example to understand the principles of how this type of light works inside interior. I'll bring up my light. The depot will be our furniture inside our interior. Don't forget we are using physical camera to see the effect of light inside our interiors. We always balance light with physical cameras. I'll start interactive render. As you can see, we have not enough light. I'll create one more camera and I'll bring it very close to our light bulbs. These are our light bulbs. We will take them apart in a few moments to understand how they work and how they are constructed. If we will take a look from a far point, let's say this is our interior scene that we are looking at. The teapot will be our furniture. As I said, we can see that it's not enough light in light, Lister, we can see we have five lights. These are the five light bulbs. From here we can control, and not only from here, but from here we usually control the intensity of our light bulbs. I'll bring up our intensity so you can see how it interacts with our interior. A very important thing, we have to control the overbrdes, especially on our ceiling. I'll add to intensity and you can see that our interior is filling with light. If I'll bring the intensity more, you'll see that it's too much light. This is our job as designers to control the intensity and to create a pleasant look for our interiors. I'll reset our intensity. Now let's talk about how these light bulbs are constructed alan group, so we can use just one light bulb. Also, I'd like you to see what we are seeing in our render while we are taking the light bulb apart. First of all, the glass part, we don't need that. We must focus on our light bulb. As you can see here. We have the filament, here we have a light, we will talk about it in a few seconds. This is a sphere light that we talked about in our previous lessons. We will focus on the parts that illuminate. As I said, you can control the intensity from here or you can control the intensity in, particularly for every light from the modify panel. It's a lot easier to use V lister. I'll move this part, it's not eliminating, it's not interesting for us. In this lesson, I would like to focus, as I said, on the parts that illuminate. First of all, I would like to show you the V light material. We'll talk about it in the next lesson. Here is the intensity that controls the glow or the light that comes from the filament. We call it filament V max is just an object, it's just a mesh. Our light material in this case, it's got a fall off applied, so we could imitate the glow of a real filament. Now the second the glow inside our light bulb, it's also a ray light material. I would like to show you how this V light material works from scratch. By the name, you can see that it's a material, it's not a light, although it emits light. I'll create a copy of our tripod, search for our V materials, and I'll choose a Vira light material so we can see and understand how it works. Here it is V light material. If we apply this material, you can see it's not enough light for now. We can increase the intensity from here. And you can see that our teapot begins to glow or it's emitting light, very light material renders faster. But it can create some artifacts. If your quality is not enough, I'll show an example from a project so you can see it in a real situation. 24. 24 Vray LightMtl and Self illumination example: V. Light Material is generally used for producing self illuminated surfaces. It can create some artifacts, but it allows faster rendering rather than standard free gas max material. With self illumination enabled, it turns an object surface into an actual light source, being both at the same time, material and light. There are actually a few methods to represent self illumination in Vra. We can create a self illumination effect for a simple ray material. This should be one method. It will be seen by a self illumination in light mix. When we adjust our lights in this scene, I used very light material. This would be the second method. Still light mix, sees it as just self illumination. No matter if it's the first or the second method, there is one more method using mesh light. It's the best one. Allows V ray to combine direct and GI sampling of the mesh light for the best results. Without GI, the light may produce noisy results for the surfaces that are very close to it. 25. 25 Artificial interior lights, Self illumination: We talked about three main types of lights in V. First was the light bulb. And it actually doesn't matter what type of bulb we are using. In reality in V, we simulate that using V lights. Simple very. Lights. And the rest of the model that simulates the light bulb, like the filament and the glass parts. In reality, we call it a light bulb for Vra. These are different objects, once again, the three main types. These are V ray lights, simple ray lights. Second will be self illuminating objects. We can create them using Vralight material or self illumination feature from Vramterial. About this we will talk in this lesson. The last one, the third will be mesh, which is actually also a Vralight. It turns a mesh or an object or a model into a light source. I'll show that in a few moments. Now let's continue to see how self elimination works. Although V ray light material, as I said, it's also a self illumination. We can use the self elimination feature. I can pick a color, any color. Actually, I'll pick another color so it doesn't look like our teapot. And we can increase the self elimination using multiplier. Here we have GI. If we will enable that, our self illumination effect will glow. We must control the effects so we can see the object itself and the light coming out from this object. As designers in our interiors, we will use not only just one light source. I will activate, if we can say so the upper light, so can create a more complex light effect inside our interior. In general, our duty as interior designers is to install lights inside an interior project in such a way that the light equally eliminates our space and we avoid overbrights. Of course, we must have enough light. The types of lights that you are using, where you install them, depends on the style and what you are trying to obtain inside your project. Let's get back to our self illumination. I'll bring another type of light inside our interior. They are usually used for bedrooms. I would like to show how self illumination works with real type of lights. As you can see, we have a self elimination effect, but it's not too strong. I will pick another material. Let's try to analyze how these types of lights work. As you can see, they are using self elimination, In this case, one of those three types. We must obtain a realistic view of our light sources. They must not be set it too high, too low. Adjusting their visual pleasant intensity affects the realism that we are trying to obtain in our images. I'll try to bring them closer to our wall and I will change their color so you can see especially their effect on our interior scene. In the next lesson, I'll try to show the last type, the third one, mesh. 26. 26 Artificial interior lights, Mesh light: Now the last one mesh. I'll bring another type of light. It's a lead light. We will take it apart so we can see how it's constructed. I'll bring it closer in front of our camera. It's pointing down, but I will irrotate it so we can see the light. In this case we can see it's not emitting light. Actually it emits light but it's not enough light and we will increase its intensity. Here is our mesh. Light on group can access our mesh. As you can see, it's a V ray light only. It's a mesh type. And we are using temperature for our interiors. As we talked in the previous lesson about temperature, this is the mesh type. Let's bring up our intensity. In this case, it's using default units, but it doesn't matter. As I bring up our intensity, you can see that the lamp begins to glow. How much light we need depends on the scene and what we have to eliminate. We have to, remember, we have to avoid overbrides, but we need to have enough light. In the next lesson, I'll try to show you a very cool feature, light mix. In the first part, we will talk about its basics. In the second part, I'll actually attach a lesson from other course, so we don't have to construct a project from scratch for now. The main idea is to understand the principle, how it works. 27. 27 Artificial interior lights, Vray LightMix basics: Now let's talk about light mix in this part. As I said, this will be the basic part, how it works in the second part, I'll show in real example of a project how this light mix works in an interior scene. First of all, we have to use brute force and light cache. You must add light mix and render elements and we must use render. Here we can see light Xs in this list. We can control every light that we have in our seeing, the render must pass so we can see its effect. We will wait a few moments. You can actually name all the lights so you don't get confused by numbers. As you can see our self elimination, it's an individual layer. I'll attach one more lesson about this. We can increase the light using this light X and we can control the overall appearance of our lights in our interior scenes. One more thing I would like to show. I would like to show you the effect of self elimination using layers from light. First, we have to render those parts. I'll follow mouse function in a few moments. As you can see, very light creates artifacts, so it's better to use mesh, otherwise you'll have to increase, grammatically, your quality. And as you can see, we can turn on enough self elimination and you can even change the light color that glows. 28. 28 Artificial interior lights, Vray Lightmix: Next. As I said, I have to show light mix inside an interior project. But instead of that, I will show free lessons that are actually linked between them, because light mix is just a part of the interior process. First, we have to model our interior. And using an interior design plan, we have to install our lights. That depends on the style and the situation from the interior space. Anyway, I would like to show an example from a small bathroom that I've modeled. And before light mix, we have to do a stage that's called light test. So first is the light test when we install and balance our lights. Second is light mix that we talked about. And the third one will be via lens effect that I'm applying to increase the reality inside our image. All those are linked together. So I decided to put all three lessons so you can watch and understand the whole process from start to the end, so you can get a full overall idea on the light process inside an interior project. 29. 29 Light test for interior spaces: Let's talk about lights. First of all, before beginning any light process in any interior, we must do a light tests. This is a stage that a lot of designers skip. And I would say, here lies a very big mistake in interior design process. There are stages of parts of work that are done only by the designer. In that way, many designers think they can rush or skip that stage, as the clients do not see their results as it actually does not affect the final result as they think. Of course, there are designers that already feel what they have to change in that way, the image, the final image that is shown to the client already looks good. But don't forget one thing, they probably already have passed that done that process a lot of times. Don't underestimate this stage, this is a very important one. This is the stage where we obtain color balance and proportion. If your composition or proportion looks good, your final render will look good as well. Okay, let's get to our render. First of all, I'll change that material so we get uniform color. An overall uniform color. I'll go to settings. I'll set brute force and light cache. I'll add Noi, I'll add light next. We will talk about that a little bit later. This is a very cool feature that appear recently in this five version. Let's try to render and see what we actually see. In our first render, there is a lot of blue light and our main spots actually don't have any effect on the overall scene. Second, our camera cuts a bit of the upper element, we must move our frame, our camera view that way that we skip that. Of course, we can retouch that in Photoshop, but it's a lot easier to move it, so we don't have to do that in Photoshop. As I said in the previous lessons, we are using the most wide opening. I'll change to market for the final render. We will have to change noise threshold and I'll switch to exponential. Some use Reinhard, but I do prefer exponential. That's because I'm doing post production in Photoshop. You'll see that later in this course. Very importantly, we have to turn off gamma. I'll use light cash for secondary balances. Now let's try to adjust the lights and to increase our intensity of our spots as we are seeing a blue scene to overall our scene. So we have to correct that. Let's see how it looks. That's closer, but it's still not enough. We must increase our spots, our spots intensity. It's a lot easier to leave a spot that's an instance. Copy outside and change one light and the others in the scene will change as well. I'll and group till I will get to our light source. Here it is. And I will try to increase until we obtain a normal intensity. Yes, that's a lot better. Although this looks very close to what we need after we apply our materials, we will have to adjust that one more time. That will be just fine tuning. Because materials can be dark or light, the overall perception might change. One more thing, don't forget we have white color. Now we have to obtain a normal intensity and we will readjust that. As I said, we'll fine tune that after applying our materials, we cannot guess. I'll change the intensity of our hidden lights. Anyway, this is very close to what we need. It doesn't have to be perfect. As I said, we will readjust that one more time, but it has to be very close. The next lesson, we will get to our materials and we will try to apply them, our surfaces. 30. 30 Vray Lightmix example: Vira Light Mix. In this lesson I'd like to talk about Ra Light Mix. This is a new feature of Vira five version. Actually a lot of people change from Vira to Corona render and all that because of this feature. Well, of course it got its advantages, but if you think this is an almighty instrument, any way to solve any light situation in your sin or in your interiors, Then I'll say, don't expect good results if your light balance or light situation in your sin, it's totally out of range. One more thing, I would say there is no need to change from corona to or vice versa, because lighting must be adjusted in the same way no matter what render you use. I would say this is more an instrument of fine tuning than one instrument that corrects your light situation by one click. Don't expect that. But anyway, it's a very cool instrument. If you have done your light test and adjusted your light intensity, then I would say it can save you a lot of time and a lot of test renders to get to the final result. Okay, let's see how it works. In the render, you must switch from LGB to light max. You can get access to the Vira lights or the separate layers of V ray lights. Don't forget this instrument is based on reflected light. Must have an algorithm like brute force for our primary bounce engine. You can turn on and off any light in the scene. First of all, you'll have to add in the render elements. Denoise and Ray Lightmx can get access to those functions. You have to switch to brute force. As these functions work, as I said, with reflected light, it won't work with radiance map. Any light in the scene has its own separate layer. You can control its intensity, even the color. But don't forget, your lights must be very close to a normal intensity unless you'll get artifacts and results that you don't expect or desire in this scene. I would like to increase the intensity of the back hidden light. As our interior seems to be dark, I will increase the spots intensity or the main lighting intensity. If you want to obtain realism in your images, you'll have to feel the normal intensity in reality. I'd like to add one more thing about artificial interior, artificial lights. There are different personal preferences for light color or light tint in our interiors. There are some designers that tend to use white light in bathroom interiors. But this is actually up to you, in my opinion, white light. It's a more technical light, and I like to use it in offices and public interiors. But if you think that the color of your interior is too yellow, you can always change the white balance. This is actually not a rule, this is more about personal preferences. I'll delete the white balance layer. In the next lesson, I would like to talk about the lens effect. 31. 31 Vray Lens effect example: Next I would like to talk about ray lens effect. We can find its options here. These are the effects options. First of all, we'll have to enable Bloom glare effect. This effect simulates real world camera lens behavior and you can see the effects options as well. You can adjust the size intensity in the render. You can see how it affects the lights in our image. We also can control the Bloom effect in this roll out low. We have some options of secondary importance that are just some variations of these first main options. I would say it's enough to use just these main upper options to obtain a realistic effect for your lights in your renders. I will also enable and disable the effect so you can see how it affects the image. Of course, I recommend that you use this effect so you can boost up your realism in your images. 32. 32 Vray Final render settings: Now let's talk about the final part of any project, the final render settings. Light is health of any project success if and only if your project's concept is really good. And you accomplish to create the necessary symmetry and obtain the pleasant proportion in your scene. Ray is changing at this moment. A lot of settings that used to be crucial for visualization, of course, including lighting, are left behind. You got almost the highest settings automated. So I guess it's time to say the answer lies not in some secret magical settings. The design itself reveals the level of what you are actually doing. And I would say more, it's time to accept the fact that the idea is far more superior than settings. The battle for high levels moved finally towards this, as it should. And it proves once again that this fact was and will be, the main difference maker. Further, I would like to show you the final settings that I'm using in my projects. But if you expect a good result from them and you want to be proud of your result, you must accomplish the full interior design projects path. Okay, let's get to Max and open our V Re render. We will start with the image size. This is very important as the image basically is the result that you deliver to your client and you must use a commercial format. By the way, we will use only these four tabs. You can start with the 2000 pixels by 1,000 pixels. It depends the size and the proportion of your interior will dictate you what format is better to use. This format looks good for wide interiors, but we will have different spaces, so you will have to adjust. If your computer is really good, you can use 4,000 by 2000 pixels. Next, I'm using bucket some do use progressive for faster Anders, but I do prefer a bucket. You can use this level for a noise threshold, it will give you very clean results. For image filter, there are different combinations and different techniques, but I don't change anything. Color mapping, we talked about it, I'm using exponential. As I said, gamma 2.2 and no gamma for GI. Some do use radiance, but I use brute force and light cash for secondary bounces. You can use 2000. Some do increase this number up to 3,000 and you can use this level for sample size, this will be enough and of course you can add ray noiser and V ray light max. The radi nizer will give you cleaner results at the end. By the way, as an example, I would like to show you the final result that I got for the previous project. The space was small so I couldn't use a wide size. I used 2000 by 2000 pixels format. But the settings that I used were these that I showed in this lesson. In my opinion, these settings are enough for a good technical render, but the main difference maker will be your idea. 33. 33 Vray AmbientLight: I'd like to talk about two more types of lights in Vivira, ambient light and VIS lights. They are not used usually in interior design, at least ambient. Although some do use VAS lights in their projects. First of all, I'd like to explain why I don't use them in my projects. In our interior design projects, we're simulating the light that comes from real light sources. If you intend to obtain realism in your images, you should copy and simulate the same real light behavior. Adding unknown sources of light to simplify your light task in your project will decrease your realism in your images. That's why I don't use neither ambient nor IS lights in my projects anyway, I will shortly show you how they work and we will start with ambient. Let's start a new file. Let's model the plane and the simple teapot. I'll increase the segments and I will assign a simple ray material. I'll start interactive render so we can see what is happening in the VA lights. We have ambient light. As you can see, it's a light source that comes from everywhere. Here we have three types. We can use direct and GI. Only direct or only GI, we can change the color for this light. By the way, by this you can see its effect on the surface. Also, we can use a map like for our Vray lights. If you remember the first lessons for Vira light properties and also we got to exclude that works the same as for our previous lights. Let's open our previous scene and I would like to show you how it works in our interior. It basically adds light to overall lighting situation inside an interior. And not only that's why I said I don't use it. It creates a deneoration of our light situations inside our interior. It is used to somehow simplify your light adjustments in your scene. And if we target photorealism inside our images, we should avoid it. I'll assign the previous material to our teapot. You can see this will be our furniture, so you can see the whole effect. As you can see, we have not enough light. The only light comes from outside, from our HDRI. I'll add an ambient light for now. You can see there is almost no effect, but I will increase its intensity. And as you can see, it creates an overall ambient light. But as I said, it breaks the real light distribution. So it kills realism in your images. 34. 34 Vray IES: Same thing with very IS lights like with the ambient light? Some do use them in their projects and actually it was a time at my start when I used them too. I'll repeat myself one more time. If you intend to obtain realism in your images, you must not break the real light distribution inside your scene. Very IS, lights are usually used to create light effects on the walls and not only, and many do use them as well to create and add to their ambient lighting inside their scenes. Many do place the VraIAS lights underneath the spots to create a pleasant light effect on the walls. I'll show in a second. But this, as I said earlier, kills the real light distribution inside your scene. Yes, they create cool light effects on the walls, but it seems like there are two light sources in your scene. I don't use them for a long time, but it's up to you if you want to use them. I'll show in a second how they work. And the last thing that I would like to say is that on my road to realism, I understood that you cannot skip the light test. If you want to be a specialist in interior design, you must do the light test. Be patient, don't search for easy, fast way, and go with a professional approach. Sooner or later you'll understand that you cannot compensate with effects, your design skills, the real lights distribution inside an interior project. This will be actually the thing that your client will see every day and not some effects on renders. Remember, your project must look cool as in render, same as in reality. Okay, let's see how the IS lights work in Max. You can see here a collection of IIS lights. You can find them for free in Internet. There are a lot of free collections on Google. I'll open the same scene. We will continue. First of all, let's start interactive render so we can see what is happening. I'll delete our previous ambient light. I will draw an IS light. We have the light itself and the target. Usually we target from upside down. I'll select the light and the target both. And I will move them closer to our wall so we can better see their effect. Here we use our IS files from our collections and here is our intensity value. You can change the color of temperature. These are the main features. Everything you can live on defold. I will increase its intensity. You can see how it affects our scene. We will have to adjust our intensity. Let's choose an effect. And we bring this file here. As you can see, we obtained from a circular sphere type of light. A light effect that you can see on the wall will increase its intensity so you can see better how it affects our wall. As I said, many do place them underneath the spots to obtain this type of light effect. Usually they use them in bedrooms. For example, if we have a decorative wall, we can use a few spots. I'll turn my camera so you can see better what's happening. We will have to raise them a bit, so they seem to be the lights that are coming from our ceiling. I would like to start in render so you can better see the effect. In render our image, it's a bit noisy. I'll use a radios that we'll get rid from a part of that noise. Now underneath you can see the denoising effect. These are our gray IS lights. 35. 35 Conclusion: I want to thank you for watching this course. Now you have the main knowledge that you need to start an interior design project. And as I said from the start this course, it's not a project. It's about the main concepts, but they lead to creating interior design projects. Before you start your own ideas, especially if you are at your start in design, I suggest that you take an already accomplished project. So you can skip for the start, the parts that require modeling and designing and you can try to repeat the same light simulating like in that project. By the way, if you don't find a full accomplished project, you can check my full bathroom modeling course. Anyway, the idea is that you need to test your light skills so it begins to make sense. And you'll be able to link this knowledge from this course to the real project. And after you accomplish to recreate the same light situation and obtain the same render, you'll be ready to continue further on your own to implement your ideas for other people in their design projects that they will require from you as you grow as a specialist in interior design. I want to thank you one more time and I hope to see you at another course.