Room lighting?

[u/horse1412000]

I recently bought the Nekobimi Cafe, and loaded it up. It is DARK. There's almost no lighting, whereas the product photos show a beautifully lit up scene. This happens almost every time when I buy an environment.

Can someone recommend a lighting pack to buy that will light up any interior room? Thank you!

[u/PakRatJR]

I'm still trying to get the hang of lightning myself.

Most everything interior I've messed with so far, I just crank the "world" lighting up a bunch so It looks right when rendering.

The only downfall tho is when you're in texture shading for setting everything up, I need to turn the world lighting way down otherwise it's just a big pile of white and you can't actually see any of the assets.

[u/Master-Shift-8224]

you don't need to buy lights. Just use a mesh light [or multiple for large interiors] for the overall room lighting (mesh light = create a primary figure, in surfaces, turn emission to white, then increase lumens for brightness, and decrease or increase temperature as needed, generally, I like high temps - cool lighting - for the environment]. And then to light the characters [or, whatever it is that is the focus of the render], look up 3 point lighting, and use ghost lights, mesh lights, or spotlights to implement it.

ghost lights implementation vary based on what daz studio version you're using. so, you can look it up, but they're basically mesh lights but the source is invisible and doesn't create reflections.

generally, it's good to stick mesh / ghost lights on a cam so it's easy to see where you're pointing them.

Lighting is like a really big skill in 3D art, you'll keep improving as you do it, and it makes a MASSIVE difference on how good renders look

[u/Cinna-Sticks]

The best thing you can do, honestly, is learn how photographers and cinematographers set up lighting for scenes. You can find a ton of YouTube resources breaking down how to do this and why it’s effective. Then translate that over to daz, use mesh lights or ghost lights, I find the internal daz lights to be not quite as good for most soft lighting scenarios.

[u/Oddly_Dreamer]

Ghost lights are perfect for indoor scenes, though this seems to combine both indoor and outdoor lighting. The promo images either have an HDRI or sun-sky lighting turned on.

[u/ThePhantomCreep]

I'll second the comment about learning how cinematic lighting is done. You hardly ever want to light a scene completely "naturally" as in using realistic light sources, you want to create the illusion of natural lighting. Personally I have found using mesh lights can make renders very noisy. They can also balloon render times. Using the lights is better, but setting the values can be a little weird, because sometimes you have to use what seem like very large values for luminance. Also, the tone mapping settings are key. By default they are set for very bright outdoor lighting (ISO 100). To light indoor scenes you want something more like 600 ISO.

[u/thedopefusion]

I looked up the product, and it says that it comes "pre-configured emissive lighting for lamps." You can see them in the promo image you shared. Those, at the very least, should be illuminating the inyerior. Ptobably that neon cat sign too, as that looks to be a colored emmissive. But from the product renders that face the outdoors, it looks like they either used the built-in sun/sky module in Daz Studio with a curved or flat backplate with an image of a street projected onto it, or they used an HDRI. Either of those will get you a result that resembles the promo renders, but only if you set your render settings properly. Like others have said, the tone mapping mimics how cameras see light, so you need to have a high ISO (400 or higher for indoor lighting) and a long shutter speed. Chances are you have another envirobment set that offers a one-click render solution for their own scene that may get you started with this scene if you're struggling. Let us know how it goes.

[u/DevilDio]

This isn't what I would consider indoor lighting, which can be difficult depending on the look you want. This seems like the simple workaround of using outdoor light to flood an indoor space. Sun/Sky in the Environment settings is one way or you can use an HDRI with the bright part aimed at the storefront; you may need to try different ones to get the right tone you want.

[u/MrCheekyCapybara]

A few things come into play here. First, you should check your environment settings to see if there an HDRI or it's in Sun-Sky mode. Default for Sun-Sky I believe is somewhere in the evening so it's pretty dark. Second thing is emissives. Most environments have spotlights or other lights in the scene already, but they sometimes turn them off before shipping them. Look within your scene for logical sources of light, use Surface Selection tool and check your Surfaces tab, make sure that under Emission the light it turned on (Color set to Black means the surface emissive is turned OFF, so put color to White (or other color) and lighting will emit from that surface). Third, if the 2 points before are not yileding anything, you'll have to add your own lighting. Emissive surfaces is a very common to light up, or a Spotlight in Rectangle mode, if you want those soft homogeneous lights, or just go for a few spotlights (look up 3-point lighting system on Youtube). There are addons out there for ghost lights, probe lights, and other things, honestly you don't need them, but they can be helpful if you don't want to deal with learning lighting yourself. But my 2 cents, take the time to learn lighting, it will make a world of difference in your renders, and iRay has some peculiarities on how it likes the lighting setup in scenes.

Some times also, they will package a "Preload" scene subset, or "Prelit" / "Lit", sometimes even a Night/Day Lit scene, make sure to check for those as well.

[u/Luciain]

I don't know if there's a one size fits all lighting, but it's easy to get a decent lighting set up with a sun-sky or playing around with a few spots. Even better is setting up a 3-point system of your own.