Trouble with lighting and rendering a dark scene (maya noob here..)

[Anonymous]

**Maya version: Maya 2017 Update 4

Hey, I'm currently doing my first actual lighting/rendering of a scene, and I'm struggling a bit with the understanding of everything.

I have to do two different lighting setups, and I managed to do the first one without too much of an issue, even if there is still room for improvement, but the second one isn't going that well.

Basically, I'm trying to make the scene look more "mysterious" I suppose, by making it during the night with most of the lights off.

The issue is that there is so much noise and it's just overall very blurry and not working.

I think the lack of light (or low intensity) is probably an issue, but since it's a dark/night scene, I'm kind of confused on how to make it all work...

I've mostly tried playing with the render settings and samples, but I'm kind of doing anything at this point. And I think the rendering time is already very long...

I'll post some pictures of my "best" render so far and the settings I used to get it. (In the render you can see that there is an area in the front left side, where there is a bunch of noise, which is a problem em I still have on the other render which has a lot more light and I just can't seem to get rid of fully)

For the lights, I used Area lights for the ceiling light that is on and for the light coming through the door window on the right. I also used a Skydome light around the scene and a directional light from the light coming through the window on the left in the back. The samplings for the individual lights are all around 6 or 7. I also used emission on the materials for the ceiling light and the screens on the freezer thermostats.

Any help is super appreciated because I'm rather clueless when it comes to this!

Thanks for reading.

[mspeer]

Hi!

Calculation of indirect light is computation-intensive. If you want to keep this setup, then you have to raise the values for Sampling and live with longer render times.

An other option would be to simulate indirect light with other direct lights, which is faster to render, but will not look as good and sometimes needs more time to set up. If it's worth tuning the scene depends on your needs. If you just need one picture raise values and let it render. If you need an animation with a sequence of 1000 frames you may try to optimize the scene with additional direct lights.

Especially the SkyDomeLight is very inefficient here, use a light Portal at your window if not already done.