I would like to get similar results to a skylight (heard it's not for interior use) but for an interior space. This is a vast cave (or at least it's supposed to simulate one) with some mechanical work going on in the center of it.

Should I try and learn radiosity for this? Should I try and use a skylight rig? What about several individual light placed strategically? The end result should convey a huge cavern.

i've did a render a while ago of a living room.



the main light is a kleig light with zbuffered shadows at 60% smoothness i think.

i used dim bulb lights to lighten dark areas...

no radiosity used...

I've found that rough terrain like the walls of a cave really need light coming from a lot of angles to look realistic. What you can do to cut down on the amount of rendering time is you can put lights down the very center of the cave with low intensities to get a good effect. It also depends if your cave walls are very dark or not, but in coal mines, where the walls are very dark, you wouldn't see too much indirect lighting, so you could get away with just using your lights in mechanical areas and not have to worry about radiosity like effects.



What kind of mood are you going for? Do you have a sketch of the cavern that you're wanting to light?

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Here's a quick cave I rendered and the light layout:

Click to view attachment

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Both lights cast 2 raytrace shadows with 80% darkness. There's a light gel on the klieg light and a matching color map on the lamp itself.

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Doom 3's engine did not have any radiosity, and they were abel to get fairly decent looking caverns. If you have the game, I suggest whipping it out and playing through some of those levels to get some ideas for lighting. I can tell you that they used fog to give a greater feeling of depth. You can see it in this image:



You can see many other images of these Doom 3 caverns on this site.

Here's what my scene would look like with a bit of fog: Click to view attachment

Matt:

what does the color map on the light achieve? I understand the light gel, but have not used a color map on a light. Wouldn't the color of the light itself take care of that?

The mood I would like to achieve is something along the lines of "Voyage to the Center of the Earth." I don't have a picture yet. The tunnel you rendered looks nice already, but I want to simulate a cavern that seems immense, on the scale of about 50 to 60 feet high with a radius of maybe 100 feet.

That Doom image would do, I think. The fog makes a big difference. Can we reproduce fog like that? AM fog sure does not look like that.

The light gel is just a black and white image. It could be any other color and it would match that.

The fog in Doom 3 is pretty much the same as in A:M, so yes, it should be doable, it's just a matter of getting the geometry down so that it looks believable.

Thanks for the input Matt!

I had some free time and decided to make a cavern of my own. '

no radiosity, just simple keligs and a very large area light

"Some freetime"? O.o That looks like it's taken straight off of doom3.com, for crying out loud!

I need to learn more about this "lighting"-thingy you're all talking about...

Btw, Eric, would you mind posting some shots? I always enjoy watching your work and I somehow get inspired every time I see someone elses work (not that there isn't enough to get inspired by already, but you know, the more the merrier!)

Dan,

The texture you used on your cave is pretty much what I am after. Did you decal the walls, use simbiont, or bitmap? Any displacement, normal map? Please share how you did your walls.

Joakim,

I will probably enter this scene into the sci-fi contest at the end of this month, so I hesitate to post any pics just yet. It is looking promising already, but with the number of lights I have lighting the interior of the cave, the render times are a killer. I'm happy to peak your interest with my 3-D doodles and will post pics soon.

Dan used the same textures I had from Doom 3. Bitmap plus was the method we used. He used the uniform sphere model and the distortion box to get the cave nicely shaped (the uniform sphere makes this kind of distortion much more natural looking). Dan used volumetric lights instead of fog for the lights on the office.

Click to view attachment
Click to view attachment
Click to view attachment

If you wanted to use displacement maps, you'd have to construct your walls as intersection patches so that you wouldn't have gaps between texture seems. Here's the estimated height map for that specific texture:
Click to view attachment

Thanks for the images Matt.