How to simulate natural light in large Interior Scene

[braad29]

Hi, I’m making a large interior scene with many windows, but I’m finding it difficult to get light into the scene. 
I’m using a skydome with some area lights from the ceiling as skydome was too dark alone. But if I increase the intensity too much, areas of the render before overexposed and blown out. If I reduce it, the scene is way too dark.

would I just have to increase the ray depth a lot? 

thanks!

[daunish]

Make sure you're using Portal lights to pull in light and samples from your skydome. This will probably still be too dark but will help reduce noise. Then it's just a matter of adding pictorial lights (as in not from a physical source)!

What I mean by this, you may not like. Straight up add lights facing the darker areas of your shots, to mimic light bouncing around.

So if you have a single skylight in the ceiling facing the floor. Add a corresponding light facing up from where the light hits the floor. Fake it!! This will give you the best most controllable result, while sadly also being more work.

The Arnold render setting you should also know about is Arnold Tab - Ray Depth - Diffuse. The more you bump up these values the more light will bounce around your scene. This will DRIVE UP render times in a big way and produce lots of noise. But a good setting to know about

Best of luck!