Help, gurus!

I have several indoor scenes where the primary source of illumination is
sunlight coming through one (or several windows).  After playing with
gigantic white spheres outside my building, parallel lights coming through
the windows, and every radiosity setting combination I can think of, I
cannot get the room to look real.  Some typical results:

- If I crank my "sunlight" (a parallel light) up to rgb<100,100,100> I get
very blotchy results, though the room is lit reasonably well
- If I crank my "ambient white sphere" (a gigantic sphere outside my
building) to have ambient 100, I get strange artifacts
- If I leave lighting values down where they are reasonable (2 being a
maximal value) my room is too dark, the light doesn't bounce in the room at
all
- If I turn recursion up to 20 and increase my count to 500, my results get
a bit better... but it is REALLY slow and still very dark
- Using a light INSIDE my room gives me great results!  It is just the
sunlight that I am having trouble with.

Some notes:

- My materials all have a diffuse value from 0.9 to 1.0 - so they should be
scattering the light around the room nicely
- I tried playing with "Brightness" above values of 1.0 which light up my
room, but make my contrast levels look strange

... my goal here is to have a generic "sunlight" method that I can use with
several indoor scenes, which does not require an hour for each frame.  Is
this a feasible task?  Please tell me that I don't need to add area lights
to each window.  :)

Any suggestions greatly appreciated, sample scenes, anything.

Cheers,
JP

Post a reply to this message