I’m pretty new to unreal and this is my first try at rendering arch viz stills with it, so I’m hoping I can get some feedback on things I can change to make it better and more realistic. Our church is wanting to make some updates to the foyer area so I took their ideas, modeled it from some blueprints and came up with these renders. Although everyone loves it so far, being a 3d artist it’s nowhere near realistic or good enough for me. However, again, being new to unreal, I’m not sure what to change to make it better.
I watched this tutorial about lighting as I was having a lot of trouble with that and it helped quite a bit with giving more ambient light with the direct light/sun light and sky light indirect intensity. Beyond that I’m not sure what else to change. The ceiling square and rectangular tube lights and hanging lights are all an emissive material. I have rectangular lights right below the square and tube lights as well as a very long rectangular light down the entire hallway. I also have a point light
FYI, my lighting is baked at production level and I’m not worried about the exterior landscaping. I know that’s not realistic… it’s more of a placeholder at this point.
In this one I still have a lot of noise around the hallway walls, ceiling and water fountain fins.
In this image the light coming through the main doors is just waaayyy too much. Although it helps to light the rest of the scene, it’s not realistic and blows out the wall.
In this one the sun light for some reason seems to really illuminate the underside of the outside roof. Not sure how to keep that from happening without losing the ambient light inside.
I suggest using a post process volume for the overly bright entrance area. Place it so it extends a bit past the brightest area, and modify the intensity of global illumination and any other lighting properties (not shadowing such as ambient occlusion, do it separately from lighting properties). For the roof on the outside that’s getting brightened like it’s glowing, try setting it to two-sided in the mesh details panel, or place another mesh within it so it’s hidden but is dampening the light absorption and reflection. PPV might work there too with ambient occlusion settings increased to amplify local shadowing.
I already have the entire scene inside an unbound single post process volume. It doesn’t seem like I can have another one inside of it to affect just that bright area. Is there another way to reduce that brightness without reducing it across the whole scene? Thanks.
Hi, if you don’t care about performance, enable raytracing that will give you the best look and you don’t have to bake lightning.
Else, emissive lights don’t cast shadows so you might wanna use actual lights and only use the emissive to brighten up the lamps. Next you can try to also bake ambient occlusion when you bake lightning. Also static lights have very soft shadows, so you might wanna think about switching to stationary lights (this will still bake the GI, but you will also have defined shadows, but you can only have a maximum of 4 stationary lights overlapping).
EDIT:
As for your bright entrance, you would need to change your lightning setup to make it darker. You can make the whole image brighter or darker using post processing, but making an specific area darker (so masking out the brightest pixels and make those darker/ use the world position of the pixels to make them darker based on their position) will easily look unnatural.
