Simple Rendering with soft lighting

This rendering is AO with the lighting (GAIN?) turned up. But too many shadows.

Screen Shot 2021-04-08 at 11.25.02 AM

The problem is, your only light in that scene is coming from the sun and the sun is too high to light most of the interior directly.

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Then I turned off the shadow on the scene. Updated the scene. Saved the file. Re-rendered and the shadow is still there. (!!)

Can I add actual lighting to AO like on Twilight. Or is it just a matter of increasing exposure overall?

That’s like increasing the ISO setting on your camera to compensate for low light.

Can I add other light sources to the room with AO? I can’t seem to find any tool to allow me to do that - like there is in Twilight.

And there doesn’t seem to be a way to turn off the sun source. The sun/shadows are rendered regardless.

Yes I know. But there doesn’t seem to be any other way to lighten the on AO except for this one tool. Is there an option to add lighting within the space aside from the sun source?

I don’t use Ambient Occlusion. Maybe @SeanB will chime in.

I’m really trying to like AO because so many people on the SkUp forums rave about it. But I haven’t been able to make it work for me. AT ALL. :frowning:

This example I tried what you suggested @DaveR having the ceiling translucent. But it didn’t help with the harsh shadows or add much additional lighting.

I didn’t suggest that but did you make the top face of the ceiling plane transparent? Here I’ve painted the inside faces of the box with textures and the outside with a transparent material with Opacity set to 0.

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Oh. I see. But then it will look like I don’t have a ceiling at all.

Not from inside, though.

I’m in the process of downloading SimLab - see if I have any luck with that. Is Kerkythea the same as Thea? I have tried Thea before but maybe I will try it again.

Okay. I will try. So basically your ceiling is just 1 flat shape correct? not 3D as in the thickness of the ceiling is basically nil?

Thea came out of Kerkythea but they aren’t the same. Kerkythea is old and doesn’t have as much power as Thea but it’ll surely do what you are trying to do.

Yes. Exactly. In your view of the room you don’t care about what is above the ceiling paint do you?

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Good point. I will try.

I think there is some learning to go. What you want to do likely can be achieved. I don’t have that extension but I’d be surprised if there weren’t some brightness/contrast settings you could use. There might even be a global illumination setting. They usually exist in all rendering programs exactly for this reason. There is also likely a way to soften the shadows through general lighting settings. Maybe look on YouTube?

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Maybe try a thread specifically (titled) about the AO plugin and getting help.

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I went into a model where I have a room in a lot of shadow. This is what it looks like in model, and what Twilight does without any modifications:


So, I went into Twilight’s environment editor, and I increased the sun strength and haziness. Then, when I rendered, I went into the post-processing section and adjusted the settings to really expose the shadows, like this.

And this was my result.

I added that result with another output of just the model line art and a light ray I created with the gradient tool, and combined them in Photoshop.
den.lines !


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