andyro wrote:
It is stupid to have 2 sets of lights, some for rendering, others for scheduling, as it creates 2x the work.
C) "...under the Atkinson Doctrine, you shouldn't use the project's 'real' lights to illuminate a rendering..." - I disagree here, but Dwight has good reasons.
In the real world, photographers bring their own lighting to the scene. That's because your lighting is lousy. Architects get away with lousy lighting because the brain and eye work together to assemble a scene memory that erases lighting flaws. The iris adjusts to compensate for different light levels that exceed the latitude of film. The photographer diffuses brightness and fills shadows. Andy can wehine all he likes about how wrong this is, but anyone photographing an interior without boosting the light levels gets bad results.
Certainly, some rendering applications have secret ways to address this problem without adding lights. Archicad can boost the ambient light level to eradicate dark shadows, Artlantis uses prolonged light energy decay to keep rays bouncing into shadows, and other applications make surfaces artificailly radiant. It is a cheat just the same.
That's just one reason.
Other reasons to use an artifical illumination regime include:
-- simplified adjustments of light levels - the more actual light sources, the longer it takes to tune them.
-- the more shadow-casting lights there are, the longer the rendering takes without added realism.
Dwight Atkinson
