Simple Interior Render Settings?

[Anonymous]

Every Tutorial or Help I can find seem to focus heavily on natural daylight and lighting interior scenes with windows and the sun. However, on large buildings where windows are far from the frame of the scene or there simple are no windows, there seems to be no simple way to illuminate an interior scene by turning on ambient light to get decent renderings early on in the design process without fussing with lighting design and adding fixtures to the model (which by the way - where did all the light objects go? Did these die when CineRender was added?)

In other rendering engines I’ve found it very easy to select something like the floor slab and/or ceiling and apply illumination to it to add enough ambient glow to light an interior scene for a rendering without adding actual light fixtures. Surely there’s a simple method for doing something in ArchiCAD to get early developmental renderings without adding lights (and therefore exponentially longer render times). I get that shadows would be all off with no definitive light source, but there HAS to be another option than the black images ArchiCAD seems to want to spit out. every time I grapple with an interior shot!

AC vers. 20 (is 23 any better?!)

[Erwin Edel]

Try putting a general light behind your camera. Think of it acting as the flash or professional camera lighting.

You can still have the other lightfixtures, but just gives these a glowing surface to fake the lighting.

For the settings (bear with me, since I'm going from the Dutch Localisation here):
- turn off decay over distance to keep the lighting even
- turn off the strength of the light
- turn off shadow casting for quicker renders
- turn off any of the special effects (should be off by default)

Attached I have a scene that should work with AC20 with some quick interior settings. If there really is no daylight in your scene, you can probably turn off the sun as a light source for even quicker results.

If the scene is still too dark, play with the shutter time settings.

I generally do a second render with Ambient Occlussion in a trick that I learnt from watching this video:

I do not speak russian (only a little bit of Czech!), but with auto translated subtitles and some good comparing of the dialogue windows of ArchiCAD I managed to reproduce this. Explaining a 10 minute video here is a lot of work though.

If you have the AO render, you can use image editing software such as Photoshop to overlay it for better shadows.

[Erwin Edel]

An example using those settings in AC20 project.

Edit: I notice it gets quite reduced in quality when uploading to forum, but you get the general idea of 'whiteness' and no ugly shadow spots.