How to render realistic interior scenes
7 easy ways to transform interior scenes from flat to filled with life
The power of lighting
In interior design, lighting plays a crucial role in shaping the overall look, feel, and functionality of a space. And visualizations are no different - ensuring that the lighting is just right in your 3D scenes is essential.
Getting the lighting right in interior renderings isn't just about enhancing realism, it's about creating the right mood, stirring up emotions, and adding depth and dimension by accurately depicting reflections and shadows.
But as important as lighting is in conveying the full potential of your designs, it hasn't always been easy to achieve the perfect look. It used to involve balancing multiple different effects and carefully tweaking each of their properties.
That's where Lumion 2023 comes in. The ray tracing effect changes everything - keep scrolling to find out how.
Effortless realism
The latest version of Lumion makes it easier than ever to achieve realistic lighting in interior renderings, thanks to the ray tracing effect.
In this video tutorial, you'll see how you can use ray tracing to your advantage. Continue reading below for our breakdown of 7 ways in which you can use Lumion's different lighting features to create realistic interiors.
#1
Flick the ray tracing switch
Ray tracing automatically simulates the behavior of real-world lighting, meaning sunlight naturally bounces off every surface, reflections reveal themselves in shiny materials, and shadows appear exactly where they would in reality.
To achieve this in your interior scenes? Simply switch on the ray tracing effect - that’s all there is to it.
#2
Reveal reflections in reflections
With ray tracing, reflections appear more realistic and are easier to create. The good news is that including them in your interior scenes no longer involves struggling with reflection planes.
Let’s take creating a mirror, for example. All you’ve got to do is assign a standard material, ramp up the metalness, reduce roughness, then turn on ray tracing. And you’re good to go!
Plus, you can even add reflections in reflections.
#3
Change the mood with natural lighting
Setting the mood in interior scenes is simple with the sun effect.
Looking to create a calm, serene scene? Achieve muted colors and soft, cool lighting by reducing the sun’s brightness. If you’d prefer your scene to feel warmer, brighter, and cozier, simply increase the sun’s brightness instead.
#4
Experiment with styles
Another way of balancing light in interior renders is to use preset styles. These styles offer an effective way to convey different moods or times of day.
By choosing a style, such as daytime, dawn, interior, or overcast, you can instantly alter the feeling of a scene and decide which fits it best.
#5
Adjust the sky’s brightness
Fine-tune your interior scene’s lighting by adjusting the sky’s brightness in either the sky or real sky effects.
Bumping it up will increase the amount of light cast by the sky map, resulting in even richer lighting with smoother shading.
These settings will also impact how visible artificial lighting is. The less sun and sky light there is, the brighter artificial lighting will look.
#6
Control artificial lights more accurately
Artificial lights have also been given a boost of realism by ray tracing.
They also now reflect real-world measurement units - spotlights and omni lights use lumens, while emissive surfaces use nits. But what does this mean for interior designers like you? Well, the lighting in Lumion now more closely emulates reality, so it can be controlled with even more accuracy.
You can find out the exact amount of light units emitted and the Kelvin color temperature, then adjust your lights to match real-life lighting product units.
#7
Get creative with emissive materials
Area lights and emissive materials now cast shadows, which makes it easy to create modern, dynamic designs with LED strips, panels, and screens.
Since there’s no screen space effect with ray tracing, emissive materials that aren’t directly facing the camera still emit light. So, you can easily achieve impactful indirect lighting effects using only materials.
Express your vision with ease
When visualizing interior design, your main focus should be on the design itself - not the rendering process.
With granular control over brightness and physically accurate lighting at your disposal, communicating your ideas in Lumion has never been easier. And since you don’t need to spend as much time layering effects and adjusting settings in Lumion 2023, you can accurately express the vision of your project with considerably less effort.
To learn more about how ray tracing works and how to use it, check out this comprehensive guide.
New to Lumion 2023? Experience the latest version for free with our 14-day trial.
