Lighting in Renderings plus Another Free ArchVision Webinar

The other day I was comparing notes with Scott Brown, from The Beck Group and a Top 10 Speaker at BILT-NA 2017, about a lighting problem we both experienced in recent rendering efforts. This is one of those things where I knew the answer, but had forgotten. Once I found the answer, I was like "I knew that!".

Problem:
A continuous light source, as shown in the image below, does not emit light properly when rendered, as evident in the second image. Often, this is not noticed unless you have a light near a wall or ceiling were the hot spot is clearly not correct.

Solution:
Use the Advanced option in the Light and Material Accuracy dialog as shown below. Using the High or Best presets would also work, but they also have higher "duration" settings, which make the rendering take a lot longer. Because the rendering take so much longer and often does not look that much better, we often only use Medium. Of course, the side effect is that lighting quality is reduced. Thus, using Custom, we can select the Advanced lighting option and set the Duration to match the Medium preset of 2.

From Revit Help: "Revit uses area light sources to produce more realistic images. However, area shadows are expensive to compute. If you select Advanced when defining a custom render quality, instead of Simplified, shadows are realistic, but render time increases. (In the Render Quality Settings dialog, for Light and Material Accuracy, select Advanced.)" 

With the lighting method set to Advanced, we now have a proper light distribution as shown below.

Now, before you say "We use Enscape" (a program I also use and love) so that does not matter to me... we see it has the same problem as shown in the image below. I have not found a way to correct this in Enscape. I have not followed up with the Enscape team yet. I will follow up if I find a solution for this.

The previous example uses a generic light source in the Revit family. If you attended my Luminaire Content for Experts at BILT-NA 2017 or one of the training webinars I did for ElumTools, you know that generic light sources are not valid for professional lighting calculations.

Shaded view with photometric web (IES) file specified...

Revit rendering with photometric light source - Medium quality...

Revit rendering with photometric light source, Custom quality with Advanced lighting...

Enscape view with photometric light source - problem still exists...

I will be posting about this again, but a quick plug here for a free ArchVision webinar I will be doing next month...

"Revit Rendering with Dan Stine - Materials and Lighting" presented by ArchVision

Join us for "Revit Rendering with Dan Stine - Materials and Lighting" as he shows beginner and intermediate Revit users how to use Lighting and Materials to create beautiful renderings. Workflow into other platforms will also be covered. 

Click here to Register

To learn more about Archvision and Avail click their image to the left on this blog.