Lighting an interior that only receives natural light through doors or windows can be a difficult task. In fact, for the most part, the lighting of the interior comes from the light bouncing off the walls, floor and ceiling. In order to achieve a good result, this ‘bouncing’ must be handled properly. Here is a tip on how to obtain good lighting with just one light source in a scene like the one represented in the image below.
This scene does not contain any light. In order to simulate the natural light, follow the below steps:
- add a light to the scene using the Light tool that you find in the modelling toolbar;
- place the light anywhere in the scene;
- open the Shading panel, right-click on “Light [none]” in the shader tree and choose “simple sky”.
Now we need to adjust intensity and shadows. Set them as in the picture below.
At this point, if we render we can have an idea of where the direct lighting hits the floor (see image below). The scene is dark because we have not yet activated the ‘bouncing’ of the light.
In solidThinking, there are different ways to activate and control the light’s bouncing. In this case we will use a method that provides extremely fast, high-quality and natural-looking results.
We use the Final Gather algorithms that we can activate in the Rendering section of the Shading panel. Once it is enabled, we just need to control and adjust some parameters, as shown in the images below.
Once we have set these parameters, we can render and see the final result (see image below).
