Oldschool CGI Lighting

Modern Archviz techniques are based around complex simulations of daylight and photometric light settings.  The mentalray render engine uses Final Gather and Photon Mapping to automatically generate a distribution of light throughout a scene or a camera view but this requires a good chunk of computer resources to calculate and can take a hell of a long time.

Before all this clever software was available CGI lighting artists cleverly faked realistic lighting by using simple spotlights, omnidirectional lights and direct lights.  This is more art than science.

With modern computers being many times faster than those old machines, render times for old school lighting in these situations are tiny, so I've decided to try learning those techniques to help me generate walk-throughs which typically require many hundreds of frames.

Advanced lighting with Global Illumination, Final Gather and Ambient Occlusion

The same view with simple lighting to fake the natural daylight

Obviously my first effort at this isn't completely convincing, but it goes someway toward simulating the realistic lighting that can be achieved with a more complex approach - but with minimal rendering times.  More soon...