Global illumination, Final Gather, Daylight System, Image based lighting....

...lighting a architectural scene can become a lot of work. To speed up this process I usually use almost the same basic setup for most of my scenes which is a combination of a daylight system and HDR-image based lighting in conjuction with Final Gather and Global Illumination.
If I find the time, I´ll post a quick tutorial on how to setup a scene like this. Until then, here are some shots of a scene that I ´ll use for my upcoming Showreel 2010 which I hopefully finished at the end of summer.
(Sorry for the low image-quality but higher final gather-values results in much longer render times which I´ll save for the final render)

 

Wacom-Pen with stand.

Organizer (modeled in max, detailed in ZBrush. But at this level of quality the details are not really seeable)

Unfinished Office with no textures at all! But I´m quite happy with the lighting so far, except for the lower right corner. Somehow the global illumination is´nt lighting this spot properly...

UPDATE
Due to a lack of time here´s just a small update with textures and a slightly optimized lighting (the black hole in the table is on purpose for later compositing-effects)

Material based illumination using MR

I did a few tests with material based lighting the last few days which I think is the most challenging thing in 3D-lighting. I saw a lot of nice pictures and videos around the web showing great lume-materials using VRay or third party-plugins and wonder if mental ray is´nt capable of such a nice effect. Short answer: It is!


There are NO lights at all in this scene. The overall illumination comes from the materials itself using mental rays lume shader! I´ll post some more shots the next few days....