hey guys, it's Hadi again from HM
studio and in this video I'll show you how to illuminate this gorgeous interior
scene with corona renderer you'll learn how to do that with the Sun and sky HDR
images and how to add some extra artificial lights to get a uniform
looking light all over the scene and also, I'll teach you how to use multiple
environment lights with the light mixer in order to extract many different moods
out of only one render but before we start please don't forget to subscribe
and hit the notification bell also that's being said let's move over to 3ds
max and start the project okay for indoor lighting we have two different
source of lights the first one is natural illumination by
capturing daylight using windows or skylights which basically is the main
source of light during daytime and the second one is by using artificial light
sources such as lamps and light fixtures there are so many ways that you can do
indoor lighting but in this video I'm gonna show you how I do it almost every
time for me always the first step is to use an override material so I could get
a clearer idea about how lights are reacting in the scene it would be so
difficult to tell if I have many different complex materials with
different diffuse color reflection refraction and other stuff so in order
to do that I need to enable override material under the scene tab and apply a
simple Corona material to that also I need to exclude light glass and portal materials because obviously, we want the environment light to get through the
window okay the next step is to add the portals. we need to cap the openings with
the simple plane geometry just make sure to cover the whole space so don't forget
to use the snap tool for that and just so you know it doesn't matter if the
normal of this plane is facing inside or outside it'll work either way now I just
need to apply a portal material to that portals are telling Corona how to sample
light more efficiently which helps to get rid of image noise much faster so
it's really necessary to use them okay as the first method we're going to
use the Sun and sky. first of all, let's go to the top view and start by adding
the Sun into the scene now move it up to here so we could get a nice afternoon
sunlight. as for the environment, we need to add the Corona sky first make sure
the Sun is selected then go to the modify panel and add Corona sky to the
environment slot by clicking over here okay now let's start interactive
rendering to see what we got so far. as you can see the intensity is way too
high but the first thing you always want to do is to increase the highlight
compress. increasing this number reduces the burnout effect on the bright areas
but also reduces the contrast of the whole image which actually is not a big
deal because we can always add some extra contrast by using this option over
here or in the post-production with Photoshop or any other software that
you're used to. okay I still feel the intensity is too high therefore I'm
going to reduce the intensity on both coronal sky and Corona Sun. I'm going to
use the same number for both of them. to modify the corona sky intensity first I
need to drag it into the material editor and choose the instance. now let's double
Click on it in order to get access to its parameters and reduce the intensity
by half. now let's use the same number for Corona Sun as well. okay it already
looks so much better you should know that by moving the corona Sun along the
Z-axis you can match the way that light looks at different times of the day so
for example if I want to have a sunset I could simply move the Corona sun all
the way down close to the ground all right these buildings are blocking
the sunlight so let's move the Sun slightly to the side. okay, this is fine.
now that we're here there's something else I should tell you as all of you
know the Sun appears to be bigger when it's closer to the horizon line. to
simulate that effect we have this option over here. by increasing this number the
light source which in this case is the Sun will get bigger, therefore we'll get
softer shadows. I can't give you an exact number for that because it's kind of
like your artistic touch. so feel free to test some different numbers and see
which one is more suitable for your project. you can also use this option in
the overcast weather, when the sun shining through the clouds and shadows are soft. for this seen I don't want to have any
sunlight in the room instead I want that on these buildings across the street so
I'm going to move it over here for now. that's perfect okay that was all about
the corona Sun and sky now let's start with the HDRI. just make sure to make a
copy of the corona sky into the material editor because we're going to use it
again as one of our multiple environment lights when we start with the Lightmixer. I've already done that when I was trying to reduce the intensity now we
can remove it from the environment slot by right-clicking over here
and selecting clear alright now let's add the HDR image into
the material editor. first you need to create a corona bitmap and load your HDRI
image for this scene I'm going to use two HDR images let's start with the
cloudy weather and later on I'll create a Dusk mood as well now let's connect
this bitmap to a corona color correct node and then we can instance this node
into the environment slot. the reason that we're using this color correct
node is for us to be able to change the intensity contrast and saturation of
this HDRI image if that's necessary. now let's start the interactive rendering to
see the result. I think it's good as it is but you always need to rotate the HDRI
image because you might find some more interesting moods. I always rotate the
HDRI for a full circle by 90 degrees steps and save out the result in the
history panel so I could compare them to each other and decide which one is more
interesting. in this case, I don't want to make any rotation but I'll show you how
to do that anyway. first I start off with zero Degree. I let it render for a decent
amount of passes so I could see how is the balance between the lights and
shadows. ok let's save this and try again with 90 degrees. I'm going to pause the
video and repeat the process with 180 and 270 degrees as well all right now we can compare these
images together. with the left click you can set any of these images as A and
with the right-click, you can set it as B let's start with the first two images
I'm going to set this one as A and the second one as B. now with this slider
over here I can compare the two images let's say I like the second one better
so I'm going to set this one as A and the next one as B and so on. as I said
before I'm not going to change the rotation for this image so let's change
this number back to 0 and we're done with this one. I'm gonna use another one
with dusk mode but this time I will speed up the video since everything will
be the same for that image as well. okay now that we're done with the
environment lighting it's time to add some artificial lights such as halogens
pendant lamp and this floor lamp over here. let's start with the halogen lamps.
first off I need to create a disk light right below one of the halogen lamps
that I have in order to do that I'm going to the top view first, create the
light with three centimeters of width then I'll move it up in the front view. now let's make some copies of this light
for all of the halogen lamps. just make sure to make them instance all right now
let's run the interactive rendering and modify the lights as it's rendering I'm
gonna turn off the environment light for now because I want to see the effect of
the halogen lamps alone. okay first of all I have to disable all of these
options because I don't want to see the light source in my renders and also we
don't want to get any reflections from them in the window. as you can see
the intensity of the lights is way too low. I'm going to increase the intensity
until I get the desired effect. 1200 seems to be a good number but they're
not still bright enough and that's because I haven't used the
directionality option yet and they're casting the light like area lights. I
need to increase the directionality to get the spotlight effect. okay let me
save this render so you could see their differences after I add some directionality to these lights. the light emission will get more concentrated as I'm
increasing this number. for these spotlights somewhere around zero point
four is a good number all right now let's compare the two
images. as you can see the image on the right is brighter although I'm using the
same intensity for both of these renders as for the color I always keep them
white. because I'm going to use the light mixer and it's easier for me to adjust
the colors over there. there is another way to make this spotlight effect and
that's by applying an IES profile to your lights. to do that you just need to
click here and choose one of the IES profiles that you have. there's a small
pack which comes with theCorona renderer and I'm going to use one of these. but
first let's try some of them for you to see their differences okay for this
scene I'm going with the wide soft which I think is nice. okay we're done
with the halogen lamps, I'm going to illuminate the pendant lamp as well. for
that also I need a disk light like halogen lamps but this time I'm going to
use the directionality instead of IES. now let's create the light source in the
top view and I'm going to move it up to here. this time I'll turn off the halogen
lamps so I could see the effect of the pendant lamp. I'm gonna increase the
directionality to 0.4 and the intensity to somewhere around 250. okay
it looks nice I'm going to do the same thing for the floor lamp as well. let's
turn off the pendant lamp this time and create the light I think it looks nice as it is but if
you want, you can use an IES profile for that. I'm going to leave it this way.
now for the last step let's add some lights below the cabinets. for that I'm
going to use a narrow rectangle light now let's isolate the top cabinets and
create the light in the top view. I need two more copies of this light for
the sides and I'm going to choose instance again. now let's scale it down a
bit and make another copy I'd forgotten to move them up so let's
do that first and I'm going to use 0.2 for directionality and I'll use 200 for
the intensity. now let's turn on all the lights
together and see what we got. it seems I need to add some contrast to this image
and the intensity looks a bit high. so let's reduce this number a bit. now I
just need to add all the lights into the Lightmixer and adjust the colors. in
order to do that first I need to add a Lightmix element to the render elements
and then I'm going to add one light select element for each group of lights. for example I'm going to divide the
halogen lights into two groups. one group for the living room and another one for
the kitchen. so let's select all the halogen lights in the living room and
add them to this element. I just have to click on this button over here and
everything is done. then I'm going to do the same thing for the kitchen, pendant
lamp, floor lamp, and all the other lights as well okay you remember that we made three
different lights as the environment light and in order to use all three of
them we need to go to the environment rollout under the scene tab and choose
the multiple Maps. now from here we can add as many environment slots as we want
which in this case we have 3. so let's add three slots and use each of our
environment lights in one of these slots. okay now I'm going to add three light
select elements and use each of them for one of these environment lights. the first
one was the corona sky which is this one the second one was the cloudy weather
and the last one was the dusk mood. All right,
everything is ready now I just need to disable the override material and unhide
everything and start the rendering. I'm going to render two or three shots and
we'll modify them together when they're finished. okay guys rendering has finished and
these are the final results with default settings. unfortunately, 3ds max did
crash during the rendering and I had to recreate the Lightmix again and I'd
forgotten to rename some of these elements, therefore names are different
in here. just so you know, this one is the corona sky, this one is the cloudy one,
and this one is the dusk mood. so as the first step I'm going to turn off all the
lights by clicking on the toggle all button over here and turn them on one by one.
first of all, let's start with the environment which is the Corona sky as
you can see the exposure is way too high so I'm going to increase the high light
compress up to three. okay it looks so much better and we got
rid of the burnout effect but this image looks washed out now. so let's add some
contrast by increasing this number up to three as well. there's also a bluish tint
which is fixable by increasing the white balance up to 7500. this option sets the
white balance of the image using the Kelvin temperature. the image will get a
warmer look as you're increasing this number and it gets cooler as you're
decreasing it. okay now let's increase the filmic
shadows for a bit also, something like 0.4. this option gives a bit of situation
and richness to the shadows. okay I'm going to turn on the halogen lamps now
let's decrease the intensity cuz it's a little bit strong. okay it looks nice you
can also change the color in your scene if that's necessary, but for this scene
I'm gonna stick with the white colour. I guess we can add some more contrast but
this time let's use the curves adjustment. I'm gonna add some contrast
to the shadows which is this part of the curve and since I don't need any
contrast in the highlights I'm going to add another point to this side of the
curve and slightly move it up. all right because of that extra contrast
some areas of the image looks burned out again. so let's increase the highlight
compress a little bit more. okay it looks much better, but I'm going to add a LUT
to this image also. a LUT which stands for lookup table is a file that transforms
one range of colors in an image to another range of colors simply by
manipulating the hue, situation, and the brightness of the image. these LUTs that
you can see here are coming with the Corona renderer and I'm gonna try some of
them for you to see their effect. you can also change the opacity if you think the
effect is stronger than what you want. I'm going to use this one which I think
is suitable for this image. okay, since I'm finished with this image, I could
save these adjustments as presets so I could use them on my other renders. you
can save the post tab adjustments from here. okay let's give it a name and save
the preset. and you can do that for the Lightmix adjustments from here. first of
all I'm going to reset all the adjustments that we made to their
default values you don't have to do that I'm only doing this because of the
purpose of this tutorial alright now let's start everything from
the scratch once again we're going to start with the environment light let's
increase the intensity and obviously we need to increase the highlight compress
as well. I guess it could use some more blue color so let's adjust its color by
these sliders over here. it definitely looks better this way
but let's increase the intensity a bit more. now we're going to start with
smaller light sources first and make our way through to the big ones. I'm gonna
start with this floor lamp okay the intensity is good enough, I'm just
going to make it a bit warmer, something like this. now let's turn on the pendant lamp.
I'm going to make it a bit warmer and I'll increase the intensity to something
like 3. now to get rid of this burned out effect I'm going to increase the
highlight compress to somewhere around 6. okay now let's do the same steps for the
other lights as well. I'm gonna decrease the overall exposure
because it looks brighter than what I wanted to be. okay it looks better now
let's add some contrast as we did before a combination of contrast and curves
adjustment. now let's try some of these LUTs to see which one is working better
with this mood. all right I guess this one is fine but with less opacity. because
of that lot we have more exposure, so let's decrease it a little bit more and
maybe we could increase the environment exposure actually it was better before
so let's keep it that way just don't forget to turn on the rest
elements all the unassigned lights are going to be in this element and
everything with Corona light material but without emitting enabled like
this floor lamp over here will be here as well. okay we're done with this mood
also so let's save the adjustments as presets and use them on another render. now let's say I want to use those
presets on this render. all I have to do is to load the files. Lightmix and post. you need to modify some parameters based on each image but it's
so much faster and easier this way, right? now let's try them on this render all right it looks pretty good
I just want to take a moment and mention if you're still watching this tutorial
that means you've found it helpful so make sure to give it a thumbs up and
please don't forget to subscribe to the channel also. okay now I'm going to do
some post-production on these images with Photoshop but I'm not going to
include that part in this video because it's going to take much longer and you
might get bored. but let me know in the comments if you want me to make another
tutorial about my post-production workflow as well. okay guys thank you for
joining me today and if you have any questions about this tutorial feel free
to leave them in the comment section below.
see you next time.
